Amber Smalltalk
amber-lang.netThe 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...
Hey, finally got around to playing with Smalltalk; their interactive tutorial makes a great appetizer.
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:
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.
You could just execute 10 timesRepeat: [ ProfStef next ], at least in Pharo.
on my Mac, control-p prints and control-d is a "DoIt."
That menu item is traditionally rendered in a sans serif font, so it look like "Dolt".
which browswer you used? on both Firefox and Chrome, pressing "DoIt" gives popup error "Cannot add self to a string."
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.
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.
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
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.