History
Self was designed mostly by David Ungar and Randall Smith in 1986 while working at Xerox PARC. Their objective was to push forward the state of the art in object-oriented programming language research, once Smalltalk-80 was released by the labs and began to be taken seriously by the industry. They moved to Stanford University and continued work on the language, building the first working Self compiler in 1987. At that point, focus changed to attempting to bring up an entire system for Self, as opposed to just the language.
The first public release was in 1990, and the next year the team moved to Sun Microsystems where they continued work on the language. Several new releases followed until falling largely dormant in 1995 with the 4.0 version. The 4.3 version was released in 2006 and ran on Mac OS X and Solaris. A new release, version 4.4, has been developed by a group comprising some of the original team and independent programmers and is available for Mac OS X and Linux.
Self also inspired a number of languages based on its concepts. Most notable, perhaps, was NewtonScript for the Apple Newton and JavaScript used in all modern browsers. Other examples include Io, Cel, Lisaac and Agora. The IBM Tivoli Framework's distributed object system, developed in 1990, was, at the lowest level, a prototype based object system inspired by Self.
Read more about this topic: Self (programming Language)
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