How come nobody told me about this before? Amber Smalltalk is a dialect of the Smalltalk programming language, which is what caught my attention. I have been a fan of Smalltalk for years, but the image-based development environment proved a little too cumbersome and monolithic for my tastes. Amber to the rescue!
Amber is a Smalltalk language for web development. Now, as I understand it, there is already an excellent Smalltalk-based environment for web development called Seaside. However, what sets Amber apart from other Smalltalk variants for the web is that it is client-based, and compiles directly to JavaScript. This means, among other things, that you can go try Amber out right now using nothing but your browser! It’s the perfect “gateway drug” for the wider Smalltalk world! I find this especially appealing because it means I won’t have to learn JavaScript to do portable, client-based web programming! Hurray!
After my initial “project” (modifying the “counter” example to count only by primes), I’ve started working on a web-based game. It won’t be the much-anticipated port of my game “Press A to Win” (my apologies to both of you who were hoping it would be), instead it will be a game about numbers! A game about finding numbers’ unique prime factorizations, specifically. What? Why are you looking at me like that? Of course it’ll be fun!
Anyway, you should go check Amber out. It’s great. I’ll have something more for you to look at next week. Until then, stay curious!
