Jecel Assumpção Jr
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2013–2024
21:01 · 21K views · Sep 10, 2013
A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.
HN uses it as the canonical demo of Self's integrated, direct-manipulation environment whenever prototypal inheritance or live programming comes up.
10 comments from Hacker News
Related, and worth a watch: this video It's a video about the Self language, which I think was designed using the principles in this paper. I like it because (like Oberon) it shows that programming and graphics can be much more closely interwoven than we're used to. They were doing it in the 90's. Then we lost it somewhere along the way by trying to make everything big and user-facing.
I'd point to the work done on tangible UIs and programming environments for that. For example, the work on tangible UIs eg- Self: [LINK] This is a good demo of what could be done in the Self environment: this video GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.
I'd like to tightly combine a semi-visual programming editor, the tooling and the runtime/infrastructure into one «thing» as shown in this video [1]. You write a bit of code, you drag and drop another bit, and almost instantly it becomes «online» - the compilation / the deployment process are somehow hidden and the configuration is minimal. It just works, so you can focus on solving the actual business needs of your application - but that's a long term vision... ;) I must mention DarkLang [2] that seems to have a similar goal, but a different approach: Kretes builds on top of VS Code, and uses one of the most popular programming languages while DarkLang builds not only their editor from scratch, but they also introduced a new programming language. I find their project ambitious and inspiring - a potential game changer imho [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
This existed in the 90s! The Self programming language[0] took Smalltalk's existing visual approach and extended it to be a full visual environment with interactive animations and physical metaphors, giving you a literal "desktop" to work on. Later versions of Self also supported working on a single "world" over the network, where the other users' objects and "hands" (cursors) would be visible to you. Here's an official movie released by Sun Microsystems: this video [0]: [LINK]
Self this video Xerox Star User Interface [LINK] [LINK] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [LINK] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [LINK] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer [LINK] Symbolics Hypertext Document [LINK] Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC [LINK] The Mesa/Cedar programming environment [LINK] Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, [LINK] Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]