… at least for now!

Since I decided to step down as Amber maintainer, several colleagues and friends have asked me why I wasn't doing any Smalltalk anymore, some urging me to get back on track.

It is true that I spent countless hours on Amber, Smalltalkhub and Iliad before that. Especially Amber, creating the language was one of the most exciting projects I had. Bootstrapping it from JavaScript then re-implementing everything in Amber itself was an awesome experience and I learned a lot in the process. I simply loved working on it.

Smalltalk was the first language to really blow my mind. When I was a student and got introduced to Smalltalk, something happened.

So perhaps my decision to step down was sudden for some people, I can understand that. But like most things, it didn't happen in one day, it was rather an evolution and my job change was only the trigger. When I was working in RMoD, I was surrounded by Smalltalkers. The topic of the day was almost always related to Smalltalk in one way or another: of course I was doing (almost) everything in Smalltalk! And even before that, when I was working at Objectfusion, we were selling software entirely made in Smalltalk.

I'm now working in Sweden and my job is for the most part related to JavaScript. This means no more Smalltalk, at least at work.

But to be fair, work is not the only reason, probably not even the main one. At a personal level, after many years, I think I got less interested in Smalltalk and wanted to learn new things and get more involved with other projects, one of them being Emacs.

I might go back to Smalltalk, maybe sooner than I imagine, I don't know. In the meantime, Amber has a new maintainer who is making an awesome job, and Iliad is also maintained on Smalltalkhub.