[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RE: what is the problem?



Anton van Straaten writes:
 > I guess the question might be, when Self was developed, whether the primary
 > intent was to provide Craig Chambers with a PhD

Just to clear this up: Self existed at least 5 years before Chambers's 
dissertation.  http://research.sun.com/research/self/papers/papers.html
As I understood it, Self was invented by Ungar & Smith in the mid-80s
as minimalist offshoot of Smalltalk for exploratory programming, and
Chambers came along and made a bunch of cool performance hacks and got 
a PhD out of *those*.  (By the way, the profile-based dymanic
optimization stuff that made its way into Sun's HotSpot JVMs is not in 
his dissertation, and looks to be mainly the work of Urs Hoelzle.)
Chambers then went off to UW and invented Cecil.

--dougo@ccs.neu.edu