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Self: The power of simplicity

Authors:

Randall B. SmithAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 22, Issue 12

Pages 227 - 242

https://doi.org/10.1145/38807.38828

Published: 01 December 1987 Publication History

Abstract

Self is a new object-oriented language for exploratory programming based on a small number of simple and concrete ideas: prototypes, slots, and behavior. Prototypes combine inheritance and instantiation to provide a framework that is simpler and more flexible than most object-oriented languages. Slots unite variables and procedures into a single construct. This permits the inheritance hierarchy to take over the function of lexical scoping in conventional languages. Finally, because Self does not distinguish state from behavior, it narrows the gaps between ordinary objects, procedures, and closures. Self's simplicity and expressiveness offer new insights into object-oriented computation.

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Index Terms

Self: The power of simplicity
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Data types and structures
      2. Language types
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Communications management
        Message passing

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Copyright © 1987 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 1987

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 22, Issue 12

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Cited By

Klokmose CEagan Jvan Hardenberg P(2024)MyWebstrates: Webstrates as Local-first SoftwareProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676445(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654777.3676445
Madsen OGonzalez Boix EScholliers C(2023)Using Object-Sequence Diagrams for DebuggingProceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques10.1145/3605155.3605864(11-22)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605155.3605864
Kavalar MMarkovics PRusher J(2023)Clerk: Moldable Live Programming for ClojureCompanion Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3594671.3594682(22-31)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3594671.3594682
Kudasov NSim V(2022)Formalizing ϕ-Calculus: A Purely Object-Oriented Calculus of Decorated ObjectsProceedings of the 24th ACM International Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs10.1145/3611096.3611103(29-36)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2022
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2020.04.010
García Perez-Schofield BOrtin F(2019)A didactic object-oriented, prototype-based visual programming environmentScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2019.02.004176(1-13)Online publication date: May-2019
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Van Tendeloo YVan Mierlo SVangheluwe H(2019)A Multi-Paradigm Modelling approach to live modellingSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-018-0700-718:5(2821-2842)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2019
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Vergu VHaisma MVisser EAncona D(2017)The semantics of name resolution in graceProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on on Dynamic Languages10.1145/3133841.3133847(63-74)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2017
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