Amber Smalltalk

http://www.amber-lang.net/

by _qc3o • 10 years ago

87 48 10 years ago

amber-lang.net

vimota• 10 years ago

Code sample on the homepage please!

kencausey2• 10 years ago

Click on the Try Amber button and freely look at all of the code.

PudgePacket2• 10 years ago

Clicking it does nothing.

sriku3• 10 years ago

Relatively little work on it in a long time. I think to bring smalltalk into the web world takes a different kind of think than a straight port to Js. The dev environment needs to seamlessly cover backend and frontend and be live editable. That would also need protections. Few of this has been accomplished to date. Good project for an undergraduate Cs degree student I guess.

fniephaus• 10 years ago

Here are two other approaches:

https://lively-kernel.org/lively4/lively4-core/start.html

https://squeak.js.org/demo/simple.html#fullscreen

warent2• 10 years ago

"lively-kernel wants to permanently store large data on your device. Continue?" Pardon?

sriku3• 10 years ago

Neither of these do justice to the paradigm introduced by smalltalk. Both cases are lifting the least significant aspect of smalltalk - the single self-contained VM - and making it available within a browser. This is far from acceptable from the perspective of developing systems today. It is an SPA in the extreme and you got to take care of the backend in some other way.

What if the entire system is visible and editable live within a single IDE? - the "entire system" including everything that's running within clients of your service and everything that's running on all your scaled out servers .. and everything that's running in your "IDE".

Without having to make it smalltalk, can we borrow this idea today and implement it in JS?

spraak5• 10 years ago

Bower is a package manager for the web. It makes it easy to manage dependencies in your application including Amber. Unlike npm, Bower components are meant to be used inside the web browser.

This really shows its age. NPM is now the preferred choice for both front and backend JS development. I really haven't seen any FE tooling lately that use Bower.

mathw• 10 years ago

The endless joys of the ever-shifting sands of the frontend world. I'm pleased there's movement in trying to make it better, but part of me really, really hopes it all settles down soon. That something using Bower can be considered old really seems quite astonishing to me.

aarpmcgee• 10 years ago

Purescript, Ember.js

rbanffy• 10 years ago

The dev environment needs to seamlessly cover backend and frontend and be live editable

That would needlessly tie front and back-end, imposing restrictions on both sides for a minimum common denominator.

kaoD3• 10 years ago

Not in my experience with JavaScript. You have a large common denominator (including libraries), and only a few specific things that don't work in browser (like filesystem) that still work serverside anyways.

muraiki• 10 years ago

Have you looked at http://seaside.st/ ? Seaside has been around for a while; it offers a component based approach to building web applications from objects, including an in-browser way to inspect and modify the code of displayed components. It also offers a DSL for writing HTML, along with some support for jquery. There is also a free book to teach how to use Seaside to develop webapps, including dynamic frontends (but not a full SPA, I think): http://book.seaside.st/book

Seaside explicitly chose a "heterodox" approach in being session based and producing URLs that are clearly not RESTful. That being said, the Seaside book covers the Seaside REST package which handles building RESTful APIs.

philippeback• 10 years ago

Actually there is one more approach: https://pharojs.github.io/

Amber is interesting because of how it evolves and what it can do, like having real compiler producing JS as output.

One can learn quite a bit by studying it.

Tools have to be better and there are some limitations but still, an interesting experience.

philippnagel• 10 years ago

Reminds me of http://witheve.com, similar intentions at least.

FrancoDiaz• 10 years ago

I'm not a big fan of the Smalltalk language, but I think Smalltalk's greatest contribution to development was putting forward the idea that development environments are important for productivity.

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

Actually, Lisp did that first (as did Emacs). But yes, ST popularized the idea (which is somewhat paradoxical, as, like Lisp, ST never actually caught on).

pjmlp4• 10 years ago

You have to thank Sun and Java for it.

Enterprise was adopting Smalltalk when Java came out.

Even Eclipse was actually Visual Age for Smalltalk refurbished.

Amber Smalltalk

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