Editing Self (programming language) (section)

== History ==
Self was designed mostly by [[David Ungar]] and Randall Smith in 1986 while working at [[PARC (company)|Xerox PARC]]. Their objective was to advance the state of the art in object-oriented programming language research, once [[Smalltalk]]-80 was released by the labs and began to be taken seriously by the industry. They moved to [[Stanford University]] and continued work on the language, building the first working Self compiler in 1987. Then, focus changed to working to build a full system for Self, in contrast to only the language.

The first public release was in 1990, and the next year the team moved to [[Sun Microsystems]] where they continued work on the language. Several new releases followed until falling largely dormant in 1995 with version 4.0. In 2006, version 4.3 was released, for [[macOS|Mac OS X]] and [[Oracle Solaris|Solaris]]. in 2010, a new release, version 4.4,<ref>{{cite web |title=Self 4.4 released |url=https://blog.selflanguage.org/2010/07/16/self-4-4-released/ |date=16 July 2010 |access-date=24 May 2017 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171205194557/https://blog.selflanguage.org/2010/07/16/self-4-4-released/ |archive-date=5 December 2017}}</ref> was developed by a group comprising some of the original team and independent programmers, for Mac OS X and [[Linux]], as are all later versions. In January 2014, a follow-up, 4.5 was released,<ref>{{cite web |title=Self Mallard (4.5.0) released |url=http://blog.selflanguage.org/2014/01/12/self-mallard-4-5-0-released/ |date=12 January 2014 |access-date=24 May 2017 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171206074534/https://blog.selflanguage.org/2014/01/12/self-mallard-4-5-0-released/ |archive-date=6 December 2017}}</ref> and three years later, version 2017.1 was released in May 2017.

The [[Morphic (software)|Morphic]] [[user interface]] construction environment was originally developed by Randy Smith and John Maloney for the Self programming language.<ref>{{cite conference |last1=Maloney |first1=John H. |last2=Smith |first2=Randall B. |book-title=Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technology |title=Directness and liveness in the morphic user interface construction environment |date=1995 |pages=21–28 |doi=10.1145/215585.215636 |isbn=089791709X |s2cid=14479674 |url=http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/directness.html |access-date=24 March 2020|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Morphic has been ported to other notable programming languages including [[Squeak]], [[JavaScript]], [[Python (programming language)|Python]], and [[Objective-C]].

Self also inspired a number of languages based on its concepts. Most notable, perhaps, were [[NewtonScript]] for the [[Apple Newton]] and [[JavaScript]] used in all modern browsers. Other examples include [[Io (programming language)|Io]], Lisaac and [[Agora (programming language)|Agora]]. The IBM Tivoli Framework's distributed object system, developed in 1990, was, at the lowest level, a prototype based object system inspired by Self.