AmbientTalk is an experimental object-oriented distributed programming language developed at the Software Languages Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. The language is primarily targeted at writing programs deployed in mobile ad hoc networks.

AmbientTalk is meant to serve as an experimentation platform to experiment with new language features or programming abstractions to facilitate the construction of software that has to run in highly volatile networks exhibiting intermittent connectivity and little infrastructure.

The language's concurrency features are founded on the actor model and have been largely influenced by the E programming language. The language's object-oriented features find their influence in languages like Smalltalk (i.e. block closures, keyworded messages) and Self (prototype-based programming, delegation).

AmbientTalk's main differences with mainstream languages are that:

It employs a purely event-driven concurrency framework, founded on actors. It abandons the RPC abstraction in favor of asynchronous, non-blocking message passing. Because the system automatically buffers such messages while the receiver of the message is disconnected, the programmer can abstract from temporary network failures by default. It has built-in programming language constructs for objects to discover one another in the local ad hoc network. Peer-to-peer service discovery is built into the language. It features a dynamic OO kernel language built upon the principles of prototype-based programming. More importantly, the kernel language is reflective and hence extensible from within the language itself. The language features both traditional C-style syntax for messaging, as well as keyworded message sends a la Smalltalk. This, together with its lightweight block syntax, allows programmers to easily build their own control structures.