One of the first questions I ever asked David Ungar, when I first started to work for him on the Klein project, was, “So, what can we do to make Self more popular?”
He answered, “Why would we want to do that?”
It had never occurred to me before that it might not be a good idea to make myself crazy evangelizing my favourite programming language.
Nevertheless, I am hereby declaring my intention to actually spend some of my time writing about Self and Klein. (Maybe committing to it publicly will help me stick to it.) I’m doing this for two reasons:
- I’ve spent the past two years working with much less interesting technologies, and if I don’t get back into the Smalltalk/Self world my soul is going to implode.
- I need to find some articulate defenders of the class-based way of life, because there are some conversations I need to have with them.
I’ll post again soon, but for now I’m wondering: who’s reading this? Mostly Smalltalkers, or do we have visitors from far-away cultures too?
Self 
Since the blog is aggregated on planet smalltalk I thinky Smalltalkers will read it. At least I’m one.
Of course, I’ll read it. Planet Smalltalk is a big factor, though.
I’m a Ruby programmer
I’m myself also a fan of Self. My most urgent problem with it anyway is that it crashes way too often. At least on Linux, I’ve no idea whether that is just due to using a 64-bit Linux or whatever.
But if you like Self then I guess you may
like Io http://www.iolanguage.com/
and if you are not completely against static type checking
https://gna.org/projects/isaac/
I’ve to admit I really like the Io very much and this is a language which attracted me a bit away from Ruby. But over all
Ruby, Io, Smalltalk are all to wonderful programming languages…
Regards
Friedrich, the Linux VM is very new and you are probably one of the only people currently running Self on 64-bit Linux – I haven’t tried it myself. I’d be very interested in any feedback you could give me on when and how often you are running into trouble. Did you compile the VM yourself or download a binary? Russell
I’m interested in Self. I prodded my Perl friend (and former Smalltalker) to look at Self, and he created Class::Prototyped, from which I created CGI::Prototype, a web framework.
I’ll be watching this space. I’m a longtime Smalltalker, but I’ve always been interested in Self and other languages. 🙂
OUIZoh Very true! Makes a change to see smeoone spell it out like that. 🙂
Adam, thanks for the Klein link. I was not aware that it had a page at Source Forge.
Russell, sometimes when people complain about the Linux version of Self they are trying the old “non official” ports at http://www.gliebe.de/self/. I don’t think this is Friedrich’s case, but it can cause confusion when discussing Self on Linux.
Is there a followup, or should I expect a nice check in the mail? 😉