Re:Byte Magazine Special Issue: Smalltalk (1984)
by Jtsummers on Thursday August 11, 2022 @05:38PM
(#32432027)
> I don't see the Self influence in JS.
I think Eich's own words may be helpful here: https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/
Maybe it was accidental, but he refers to it as being Self-ish. And refers to it as "a quickie love-child of C and Self".
Re:Byte Magazine Special Issue: Smalltalk (1984)
by BrendanEich on Thursday August 18, 2022 @06:27PM
(#32515597)
I've co-authored a HOPL IV paper and given lots of talks, do some searches and you will find them (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386327). There's no doubt about this. I knew of Self and liked it but did not have time for multiple parent* slots. I didn't even have time to expose the unstratified (meta- in base-level) __proto__ property until 1997 in SpiderMonkey. I was aiming at Self + Scheme-ish (definitely "ish") first class functions because I had to interop with Java.
Re:Byte Magazine Special Issue: Smalltalk (1984)
by musicale on Friday August 12, 2022 @12:55AM
(#32434846)
I suspect Self and NewtonScript may have helped to popularize prototype-based OOP before JavaScript came around.
And of course Self's JIT/VM evolved into HotSpot and probably influenced most future VMs including JavaScript.
Perhaps you mean because of prototype inheritance? But the form in JS doesn't look anything like the form in Self. Or particularly thought through at all, really. I fear that Eich may have implemented prototype OO by accident almost?
I have a whole book on prototype OO from the 90s, and the languages in there are much better thought through (Self wasn't the only one or the first one. Actually even Smalltalk 72 is kind of prototype-OOish).
In other respects, syntax and scoping model etc, I don't think original JS looks anything like a Smalltalk-descended language.