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This documentation is a work in progress.

Welcome to the Amber documentation website!

This documentation and guides are a community effort, you can contribute your own guide!

The purpose of this documentation is to guide you step by step from learning how to install Amber to being an advanced Amber developer.

What is Amber?

Amber is a language and development environment made for the web. The language is deeply inspired by Smalltalk, and compiles to JavaScript files.

Amber includes a live development environment with a class browser, workspace, unit test runner, transcript, object inspector and debugger.

IDE

Why a Smalltalk dialect?

  • Smalltalk stands head and shoulders above most other languages for clarity, conciseness, and human-friendliness.

  • As a language, it is immensely clean and mature, both syntactically and semantically. It is a pure OO language, with objects all the way down.

  • Also, having a true live & incremental development environment where you can build your application interactively in the browser is unbeatable.

What about the JavaScript ecosystem?

Amber plays very well with the outer world. You can interact with JavaScript objects seamlessly, and even inspect them as any Amber object.

Evaluating JavaScript object methods is transparent and makes using libraries a breeze.