Back to the Future

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In working on Brie, I had been vaguely aware that the ‘Self’ language was similarly based on copying prototypes rather than instantiating classes. So I kind of went ‘yeah, whatever’ when Rick McGeer and others told me to check up on this ’80’s Xerox PARC project.

Wow. I hadn’t realized that Self was so close in both the domain and the solution spaces. If there’s interest I’ll try to produce a comparison later, but for now, check out the Self site and, in particular, this paper.

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About Stearns

Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse. Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.

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