I downloaded Cinnarch and have it running on a virtual machine. I tried to install Self, only to find that it was already installed. So I tried playing around with it, but there's a problem. Numbers, strings, etc. work, but I can't send any messages. I can't add 1 + 1. The only advancedish thing I've been able to accomplish is make new objects. What can I do to get my Self system fully working?
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Self is similar to Smalltalk in that you need both a virtual machine, and the default distribution of objects. There are a very small number of default primitive methods, and a parser built into the VM itself to help bootstrapping. You need to get the Self equivalent of the standard library/environment.
You can either:
- go to http://selflanguage.org/download/index.html and download a .snap file, then start it by running Self -s filename.snap A snapshot is a frozen collection of objects like a Smalltalk image file.
- Clone the sources from https://github.com/russellallen/self, cd into the objects directory and run Self -f worldBuilder.self This will build the default snapshot from source. If you want to open a GUI development environment, do 'desktop open'.
Either way should get you to a prompt which gives the right answer to 3 + 4.

Russell Allen
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I assumed that it came with a default image/snapshot, but I guess not, never thought...okay, thanks! – Matt Jan 05 '13 at 23:39