I seem to be afflicted with a chronic, recurring condition, a sort of living nightmare in which I imagine myself a programmer. I’ve experienced this numerous times over the past several decades, but it appeared to be finally cured in my retirement as I focused my life more on spiritual matters.
But recently, I decided that I wanted to develop a couple of Web and mobile applications in support of my spiritual teaching as well as for the nonprofit Job One for Humanity volunteer work that I’m doing. Without much of a commitment to actually doing something, I started poking around in the world of mobile application and web development.
By a chain of circumstances I can only be described as being dragged down a dark rabbit hole, I encountered a language which I had explored previously as a possible development language and environment. I’m referring to the Smalltalk-inspired Amber language. In the three or so years I have been away from Amber, it appears to have undergone considerable growth and gained in popularity. More importantly, it appeared to have overcome most if not all of the packaging, delivery, and performance issues inherent in traditional Smalltalk.
Ever since I first discovered it something like 15 or 20 years ago, I have loved Smalltalk. It is my favorite, widely-used programming language by a lot. (If I omit the qualifier, “widely-used”, then that honor goes to LiveCode.)
So I was excited to encounter a vastly improved Amber product which is a tool that generates high-quality JavaScript code from working Amber applications. Even though I’m not a systems-level guy, I set out in an effort to install Amber on my Mac with complete confidence it would be a positive experience.
Man, was I wrong!
As it now stands, Amber does not apparently have any easy way to install on any platform. It involves so many dependencies and requires so much command console typing (which for me is far more painful than programming) that I was tempted several times to give up. But I persevered. However, I kept encountering roadblocks I could not decipher or understand, and when I sought help in the Amber community — or in one of the communities supporting one of the dependency modules — I got very little response and nothing definitive that actually worked.
As a result, after three days of mucking about with it, I gave up.
But that is not the end of the story. In the course of investigating Amber, I discovered that a newer dialect of Squeak Smalltalk — which, over recent years, has become the Gold Standard of free Smalltalk environments — was also capable of spitting out web applications using generated HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This relative newcomer is called Pharo.
Not only does Pharo have a single-button install, its documentation is really outstanding. There are a number of free e-books available, several of them authored or co-authored by the original developers of the language, and they have a wonderful tutorial as well as an online video course spread over several weeks of in-depth training.
So now I’m off, once again infected by Smalltalk, learning this new dialect and the robust environment in which development takes place, for the moment at least happy as a clam. I truly hope the Amber team gets its act together on the installation side, because I’d love to explore it as well, but for now I’m sitting sale to master Pharo and make these new application ideas a reality.
P.S. to Laurence. You knew this would happen, didn’t you?