Amber Smalltalk

[owenm]

https://amber-lang.net/index.html

[owenm]

The Silk web framework built into Amber looks really interesting: https://lolg.it/herby/silk and an introduction here: https://smalltalkrenaissance.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/silk-i...

[remexre]

Hey, finally got around to playing with Smalltalk; their interactive tutorial makes a great appetizer.

[narcissismo → remexre]

Please keep going :)

Using Smalltalk (particularly Pharo) has been an eye-opening experience for me.

Its interesting to see that Amber has a Boolean class which I suppose corresponds to the JS boolean primitive. In other Smalltalks, I've seen a wonderful design where True and False are subclasses of Boolean. This way, there are no conditionals in the implementation of ifTrue: and ifFalse:

[_ph_ → remexre]

Yes, it is a great appetizer. However, that there are no navigation buttons quickly becomes an annyoance. I once pressed a wrong key and had to select ProfStef next. 10 times to get back to where I was :( One page (21?) seems to have a parsing bug.

[Qem → _ph_]

You could just execute 10 timesRepeat: [ ProfStef next ], at least in Pharo.

[mark_l_watson → _ph_]

on my Mac, control-p prints and control-d is a "DoIt."

[DonHopkins → mark_l_watson]

That menu item is traditionally rendered in a sans serif font, so it look like "Dolt".

[homarp → remexre]

which browswer you used? on both Firefox and Chrome, pressing "DoIt" gives popup error "Cannot add self to a string."

[leaveyou → homarp]

Looks like you need to select only the line of code that you want to execute before you press "Do it". Works on Firefox for me.

[leaveyou]

Installing Amber 1. The npm package

Unfortunately it's a kind of show stopper for those who don't know npm or nodejs and don't really want to deal with it.

[xkriva11 → leaveyou]

As a proof-of-concept experiment, I tried to do TiddlyWiki-like saving for Amber. So if you do some changes in the code, it can then save the whole "image" as a single HTML file without other dependencies. Only the Legacy IDE works: https://pavel-krivanek.github.io/amber/amber.html

[creamytaco]

node.js totally kills this for me (and I bet a lot of other folks). I want nothing to do with that ecosystem (which would be a reason for using Smalltalk on the frontend) and it's (afaik) a hard dependency for Amber.

They certainly don't make it easy not to use it.