Self: the movie

My recent posting on Self provoked some interest on reddit and one keen redditor found the old Self movie. I first learned about Self when one of the giant pulsing brains from Manchester university came down to a BCS meeting in London (When did the BCS stop doing things that interesting? Why?) and showed us this movie. Great days.

Self

So, Self continues to be developed and has a very nice new site, here. Self is like Smalltalk "only more so". 

These days Self runs like a dream (and blindingly fast) on the Mac. Back in the day Self would only run on Sparc hardware, so I bought a Sun workstation for the express purpose of being able to play with Self. A wise investment. If a point of view is worth 80 IQ points then learning Self is a much better bet than all that brain training and smart drinks. 

I you want to understand to powerful (and fun and (partly, therefore) enticing) a system can be if you trust your users to manipulate objects directly, take a look at Self. If you want to understand just how far the notion of Integrating and Development Environment can be pushed (and how much fun that turns out to be) take a look at Self. If you want to understand why some folks consider Javascript to be such a huge missed opportunity, take a look at Self.