The influence of Self
A new blog post
I just published a new blog post: The influence of Self. It’s all about the Self programming language:
I’ve been reading a bunch of old papers from the Self project. It’s pretty incredible how many things they invented that are absolutely essential in modern, high-performance managed language runtimes. It might be the most influential programming language that most programmers have never heard of. If you work in JavaScript, Java, or any JVM or .NET language — you’re benefitting from ideas pioneered in Self.
I’ve found nearly all of the Self publications to be well-written and easy to understand. If you’re interested in programming language implementation (VMs, JITs, etc.), the ones listed here are definitely worth your time.
If you aren’t familiar with Self, I’d definitely recommend checking out the post and/or heading over to selflanguage.org. I think it’s really inspiring to see a project that was so committed to a specific philosophy. I also enjoyed Dave Ungar’s 2009 talk at Stanford — Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores.
Other updates
In other news, I recently started working on a new research project with Ink & Switch:
Excited to be kicking off work on a new project with @inkandswitch!
— Patrick Dubroy (@dubroy) October 5, 2022
Together with @szymon_k, @wolkenmachine, and @jameslindenbaum, I’ll be working on the lab’s latest experiment in programmable ink.
I don’t have any more details to share at this point, but watch for something early next year!
✌️,
Pat