David Ungar of IBM Research reflects at Stanford on the Self language project and argues the real legacy of ideas is the people. He covers its history, philosophy, successes and failures.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN points to it as the best account of what Self made possible and what its team went on to do.
“explains the history, philosophy, successes, and failures of the Self project”HN comment, 2022
Ungar's talk on Self, ending with what the project's people did next.
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David Unger gave a great talk recently on this: this video (recorded at Stanford, but it's a reprise of his acceptance speech on receiving the Dahl-Nygaard award from memory) He has a role-call at the end of what the people involved in the self project went on to do afterwards, and it's staggering: some of the engineers of the original Google architecture, what became Hotspot as you say, Lars Bak (of Chrome V8) as someone else has pointed out... just an amazing list.
Strongly recommendssbDec 2010
“It contains a few gems, and is really worthwhile watching.”
Conveys what the Self language made possible, with a few gems.
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To get a feeling for the Self language and what was (is) possible, you should (if you can, of course) take the time to watch the video: this video It contains a few gems, and is really worthwhile watching. (Disclaimer, I think Dave Ungar has done tremendous things for PLDI; interested people should definitely check out his UC-Berkeley PhD thesis of 1986, easily one of the best I have ever seen...)
RecommendsrileyphoneMay 2022
“explains the history, philosophy, successes, and failures of the Self project”
Ungar explains Self's history, philosophy, successes and failures.
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What was really interesting about Self was its optimizability - they were able to implement a Smalltalk on Self that was much faster than the contemporary Smalltalk systems. The impression I got from poking around at Self was that there was a class/inheritance system informally approximated in the prototypical relations of the objects and traits, but that doesn't mean you can't formally define one. For anyone curious, I recommend this talk [0] by David Ungar, one of Self's creators, that explains the history, philosophy, successes, and failures of the Self project. It's a shame more didn't get done with it (though V8, arguably the most important language runtime, is very similar). Someone has even been making a Zig version of Self recently [1]. [0] this video [1] link
Cites itDonHopkinsNov 2022
“the real legacy is the people.”
Ungar argues the real legacy of ideas is the people.
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Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores (September 30, 2009) David Unger, from IBM Research, discusses how his experience in computer science has led him to the conclusion that even if your ideas succeed, the real legacy is the people. this video
Cites ithayley-pattonOct 2025
“we thought it was impossible to make this language run efficiently”
Ungar recalls Self was thought impossible to run efficiently.
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[0] is Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores < this video > > And at the time, we thought it was impossible to make this language run efficiently, because it did all these things that were more abstract than languages of the time ...
