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Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

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Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#21

Post by merubin75 »

WillAdams wrote: post #19

I really wish Livecode hadn't pulled their opensource/Community Edition (and I'd be very glad for someone to do something with that code). Gambas is something I keep wanting to try and seems promising. EDIT: Other BASIC options include Twinbasic (looks to be stalled though) and Small Visual Basic. I did one small app w/ Python and TKinter, but it was a dense wall of text/code when I was finished and not something I w…

First, thank you for the suggestions.

To answer your question: I really don’t know yet. The request comes from wanting to do a project together, and also for him to learn valuable future skills. He loves Legos, Spider Man, and Star Wars, so we will have to wait and see where his imagination goes.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#22

Post by sea6ear »

My suggestions would be Tcl/Tk or Pico 8.

Tcl/Tk is still the easiest way I have found to make small gui apps and the language and standard library is small enough to keep in your head easily.

Pico 8 is my recent love. It's a great way to make small retro style games. There's a free educational edition or you can pay $15 for the full version which has some extra export options. I've been playing with it for the past couple months and my kids from 6-11 have started to get involved. It's programmed in Lua and I and my kids prefer it at the moment to our previous attempts at Scratch.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#23

Post by dfabulich »

I think you and your kid would have fun designing a Choose Your Own Adventure game in Twine. https://twinery.org/

FWIW, there are a bunch of simple modern GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#24

Post by w10-1 »

Hypercard for coding was interesting because it relied on message-passing with a handler hierarchy that introduced modularity questions.

Small, accessible and visual languages are interesting for learning to the extent they enable you (your son) to explore on his own. But they're very frustrating because the delta between what you want and what you can do is so large, especially now that we're miles beyond hypercard/scratch in functionality.

The essential idea of coding is encoding: what behavior do you want, and how can you (most economically) represent the data and processes required?

Consider whether thought experiments would be a better way for your son and you (as a marketer) together to learn about encoding. If you focus together on learning how to think like a coder, it could be fun (instead of frustrating to drag through arcane syntax of toy languages).

The most powerful encodings are scale-invariant; the most interesting are generative. So you could start by thinking about the game of life, or fractals.

The other thing for an 11-year-old is teaching them to learn how to learn. Go with him down a rabbit hole of programming tiktoks/videos, and then step back to reflect on each, try to come up with categories, figure out how to find related topics and approaches, and summarize your results - then review them later and pull them into conversations to reinforce them. Start to see the math and encoding of life situations. Build mental models for getting frustrated (and reward systems generally), the game theory of competition, etc. -- things that will be relevant in teen years.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#25

Post by jacknews »

creer wrote: post #10

Scratch is far better and deeper than most people think. It's also interesting because the developer interface forces thinking for yourself on things like how to manage complexity in your project, or how to get different modules to communicate - and that's useful (if only helpers thought to point that out). It's very unlikely the school is digging deep in Scratch. Most likely they are keeping to the very basics - and…

It is deeper, of course it's turing-complete, and I do applaud how easy it is just to get started, and make something, which is absolutely the key to getting kids interested and keeping them so.

But I take huge issue with some of the 'deliberate' limitations. No function returns? No way to share code blocks? These are some of the fundamentals of code.

In my experience these limitations present a big barrier to kids who want to just get some things done, and teaches a very hacky style to those who are willing to learn the complex workarounds to overcome the barriers. Ultimately it leads to the majority being 'confined' to doing typical simple scratch projects, and a small 'elite' who go beyond. Possibly the opposite of what was intended.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#26

Post by techdragon »

WillAdams wrote: post #19

I really wish Livecode hadn't pulled their opensource/Community Edition (and I'd be very glad for someone to do something with that code). Gambas is something I keep wanting to try and seems promising. EDIT: Other BASIC options include Twinbasic (looks to be stalled though) and Small Visual Basic. I did one small app w/ Python and TKinter, but it was a dense wall of text/code when I was finished and not something I w…

How have I never seen that OpenScad Graph Editor!!!!

I work a lot with openscad for projects with my 3d printer and it’s been a real pain adapting some things I find to save any time, because the language is a bit odd and using libraries came really obfuscate what’s going on…

Thank you so much for sharing it!

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#27

Post by creer »

jacknews wrote: post #25
creer wrote: post #10

Scratch is far better and deeper than most people think. It's also interesting because the developer interface forces thinking for yourself on things like how to manage complexity in your project, or how to get different modules to communicate - and that's useful (if only helpers thought to point that out). It's very unlikely the school is digging deep in Scratch. Most likely they are keeping to the very basics - and…

It is deeper, of course it's turing-complete, and I do applaud how easy it is just to get started, and make something, which is absolutely the key to getting kids interested and keeping them so. But I take huge issue with some of the 'deliberate' limitations. No function returns? No way to share code blocks? These are some of the fundamentals of code. In my experience these limitations present a big barrier to kids w…

Sure. But it's now easy to move on to the next bigger thing. A kid, club or school, can onboard with Scratch, and any laptop can also run python et al. By the time a kid notices all the cool stuff that seems possible and that they could achieve total world domination, they are in a decent situation to pick another language: python, javascript, whatever. And they can do that on their own - they don't even need the school anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#28

Post by jazzyjackson »

Excel

I just went through the tutorials for a first time in about a decade (the Make Your First Pivot Table template on the home screen) and was really surprised at how they used slides with buttons (insert > shape, then right click and link to a cell reference) jumping to the next worksheet, reminded me of hypercard

from a market adoption standpoint, nothing else in this thread has much traction in allowing non-programmers at large to do compututation with their computer.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#29

Post by WillAdams »

merubin75 wrote: post #21
WillAdams wrote: post #19

I really wish Livecode hadn't pulled their opensource/Community Edition (and I'd be very glad for someone to do something with that code). Gambas is something I keep wanting to try and seems promising. EDIT: Other BASIC options include Twinbasic (looks to be stalled though) and Small Visual Basic. I did one small app w/ Python and TKinter, but it was a dense wall of text/code when I was finished and not something I w…

First, thank you for the suggestions. To answer your question: I really don’t know yet. The request comes from wanting to do a project together, and also for him to learn valuable future skills. He loves Legos, Spider Man, and Star Wars, so we will have to wait and see where his imagination goes.

For Lego bricks, is it an option to do Mindstorms?

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#30

Post by WillAdams »

techdragon wrote: post #26
WillAdams wrote: post #19

I really wish Livecode hadn't pulled their opensource/Community Edition (and I'd be very glad for someone to do something with that code). Gambas is something I keep wanting to try and seems promising. EDIT: Other BASIC options include Twinbasic (looks to be stalled though) and Small Visual Basic. I did one small app w/ Python and TKinter, but it was a dense wall of text/code when I was finished and not something I w…

How have I never seen that OpenScad Graph Editor!!!! I work a lot with openscad for projects with my 3d printer and it’s been a real pain adapting some things I find to save any time, because the language is a bit odd and using libraries came really obfuscate what’s going on… Thank you so much for sharing it!

My pleasure!

It's a favourite tool of mine (donated so that the Mac version could get code signed) and I'd be very glad to see it more widely used.

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