At first I felt the same way, because as a language designer I feel there are enough good names out there that new projects should be able to go find one that isn't taken.

However, having looked at this case I'm not against it for several reasons.

First, it looks like the project has been abandoned. There hasn't been an issue closed in 2 years, and the latest copyright date is 2019.

That might not be enough to sway me, but then you have to realize the project doesn't even really call itself a language. They are "Amber Smalltalk". This is an implementation of Smalltalk, not a language itself.

  Amber is an implementation of the Smalltalk language that runs on top of the JavaScript runtime.

  Pharo Smalltalk is considered as the reference implementation.

So you see this is an implementation of Pharo Smalltalk that runs on JS.

Finally, and the nail in the coffin, over the past couple years in the mailing list there has been little activity -- nominally a monthly message from a single user advertising the "UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting" which sounds interesting but not really about Amber Smalltalk as a project per se.

No one is using it, no one is working on it, and it wasn't a language in the first place. I would say that it's fine for an actual language project to pick up the name.

Same for me. There's still plenty of unused gemstones as programming languages so perhaps the authors may still decide to change their name.

And of course Gemstone is itself a Smalltalk

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone/S

Hmmmmmm.

Bagsy Coprolite.

there's some precedent, there was a half-done programming language called "merd"[0], I recall the author had a tagline on the lines of "if it does not succeed I can blame the shitty name!".

[0] http://merd.sf.net

There should be a link on the home page linking to the amber-lang.net to avoid confusion.

Strange. It seems to have gone down shortly after this Amber announcement.

It was up the day I read this announcement.

This looks abandoned lol.