I don't think they tried to make a product from Self, really, but it was definitely a real language with an extremely optimized runtime and a quite complete user interface. Many many hours of intense engineering went into that.
I remember being excited when it was open sourced, finally.. but nothing ever came of it. It was actually quite readable, the C++ VM implementation.
> I don't think they tried to make a product from Self, really, but it was definitely a real language with an extremely optimized runtime and a quite complete user interface. Many many hours of intense engineering went into that.
Well, the performance and the runtime were the point of the experiment, right?
I didn't mean to denigrate the effort that went into it, I just meant that I don't think anyone tried to make it anything beyond a research effort (in the sense that, say, the rust, clojure, or ruby folks have tried to do).
In our current world things that aren't been trumpeted widely are often not considered worthwhile. But I remember Self being incredibly influential, including on my own work. As in, how science actually works.
I remember being excited when it was open sourced, finally.. but nothing ever came of it. It was actually quite readable, the C++ VM implementation.