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)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“I believe my ardour for invention springs from his loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)