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THE VIDEO SHELF · self programming language

Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores

David Ungar of IBM Research reflects at Stanford on the Self language project and argues the real legacy of ideas is the people. He covers its history, philosophy, successes and failures.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN points to it as the best account of what Self made possible and what its team went on to do.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Stanford
Topic
self programming language
Format
talk
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
5
Recommendation years in dataset
2010–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • David Unger gave a great talk recently on this: [VIDEO] (recorded at Stanford, but it's a reprise of his acceptance speech on receiving the Dahl-Nygaard award from memory) He has a role-call at the end of what the people involved in the self project went …

    mark_h on Hacker News · 2010-07
    In Self language still alive - new release for Linux, Mac

  • To get a feeling for the Self language and what was (is) possible, you should (if you can, of course) take the time to watch the video: [VIDEO] It contains a few gems, and is really worthwhile watching. (Disclaimer, I think Dave Ungar has done …

    sb on Hacker News · 2010-12
    In The status of the Self language

  • What was really interesting about Self was its optimizability - they were able to implement a Smalltalk on Self that was much faster than the contemporary Smalltalk systems. The impression I got from poking around at Self was that there was a class/inheritance system informally …

    rileyphone on Hacker News · 2022-05
    In Lisp, Smalltalk, and the power of symmetry (2014)

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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