SelfLanguage

This could be intersting. An object oriented language completely built from concrete instances rather than class definitions.

• Tutorial : http://research.sun.com/research/self/release/Self-4.0/Tutorial/index.html

• Papers : http://research.sun.com/research/self/language.html

Of course, evolution, real biology, does very well without a platonic class / instance distinction. I guess Self is an Aristotelian language.

I'm too lazy to dredge up the URLs (which is good: yet another example of LateBinding, i.e. why hard-link breakable URLs when we have Google?) but I wanted to point out that Javascript (aka ECMAscript) and Actionscript (scripting language for Macromedia Flash 5 and up) employ Self-like protoype-based inheritance. Check out the pages of Steve Dekorte (on prototype-based languages) and Douglas Crockford (on "the world's most misunderstood programming language", Javascript). The Actionscripting community in particular is doing some very cool things on the OO front. One could do worse than toss Squeak / Smalltalk into the rubbish heap of history and pick up Flash MX. With a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) Flash player of < 500 Kbytes, vector graphics, 2D animation, an open-sourced file format (SWF), a number of free and/or open-source SWF compilers (e.g. Ming), native XML parsing and sockets, and a user base of perhaps half a billion installations worldwide ... well, you get the idea. Intriguingly, with the release of Flash MX and the Flash 6 player, it's possible to create Flash "movies" (programs, to the rest of us) entirely from Actionscript, sans the pathologically "user-friendly" Flash authoring environment. Fun.

Cool, thanks – PhilJones

Some links discovered and moved to PrototypeBasedLanguages

CategorySoftware, CategoryComputerScience, CategoryAbstraction