[Noise] Re: Java

[Simon Spero]

On Mon, 17 Jun 1996 s1113645 at tesla.cc.uottawa.ca wrote:
> 
> helped too (something more substantial than the windowing primitives it
> comes with). Java has all these things. (One thing that detractors of
> Smalltalk claim is that it is slow--slower than Java. However there is a
> research dialect from Sun called Self which is supposed to be 50% as fast
> as C.)

Smalltalk was in fact the first object oriented language to ever be
tweaked enough to be useful (smalltalk-80 is where JIT came from). 

Self is a completely different kettle of ball-games; it's older than java,
and based on a totally different conception of OOP. The only major 
language Ican think of that's from the same family is newton script. Self
does away with the concept of classes, and instead uses prototypes to
inherit from. The main design principle seems to have been: create a
language that's as slow as possible, then see how well you can optimise it
:)

Simon