sin-ack's writings

In my previous post, I talked about Self and gave a general tour of the language and the programming environment. I mentioned that Self was an image-based programming language. Of course, if you want to develop a Self application with multiple people, an image is not suitable for collaborating (except in real-time – we’ll come back to that in a later post). Your Self image contains everything in your programming environment (provided you don’t forget to save it!), including the active morphs you have on the screen, and stuff you are working on. Therefore, obviously, it is not possible to collaborate using your world images on version control.

So then the question becomes “How can we extract just the parts of our application so that they can be re-imported to other Self worlds independently?” And the answer to that is the Transporter system.

Hey there. This is the first post I will be making here, and I wanted to give a tour of Self before making posts about my current implementation, mySelf.

Throughout this post, I will be showing examples from the regular implementation of the Self programming environment, available here.

What is Self?

To quote the Self language homepage:

Self is a prototype-based dynamic object-oriented programming language, environment, and virtual machine centered around the principles of simplicity, uniformity, concreteness, and liveness. Self includes a programming language, a collection of objects defined in the Self language, and a programming environment built in Self for writing Self programs. The language and environment attempt to present objects to the programmer and user in as direct and physical a way as possible. The system uses the prototype-based style of object construction.