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Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

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Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#31

Post by WillAdams »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #28

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-prog…

That sort of thing makes me wonder why pyspread isn't more popula:

https://pyspread.gitlab.io/

and if mito will become popular:

https://www.trymito.io/

and whether maybe Jupyter Notebooks aren't the solution to this sort of thing.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#32

Post by jazzyjackson »

WillAdams wrote: post #31
jazzyjackson wrote: post #28

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-prog…

That sort of thing makes me wonder why pyspread isn't more popula: https://pyspread.gitlab.io/ and if mito will become popular: https://www.trymito.io/ and whether maybe Jupyter Notebooks aren't the solution to this sort of thing.

I like Mathematica notebooks a lot and have thought about using it to teach computing to kids, its great to have every possible kind of data, from colors to star positions in the sky built in, plus its got lots of great graphics primatives can can even generate 3D scenes from code

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#33

Post by WillAdams »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #32
WillAdams wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sort of thing makes me wonder why pyspread isn't more popula: https://pyspread.gitlab.io/ and if mito will become popular: https://www.trymito.io/ and whether maybe Jupyter Notebooks aren't the solution to this sort of thing.

I like Mathematica notebooks a lot and have thought about using it to teach computing to kids, its great to have every possible kind of data, from colors to star positions in the sky built in, plus its got lots of great graphics primatives can can even generate 3D scenes from code

I miss the Mathematica license my NeXT Cube had.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#34

Post by darrinm »

Hatch (https://hatch.one) has many of the characteristics of HyperCard plus its "projects" are full featured, shareable and remixable (if you want) web pages.

- Easy drag-and-drop interface with a library of images, audio, video, etc.

- Programmable with Visual Scripting for an easy on ramp to adding logic and behaviors.

- Programmable with Javascript if that's what you want to learn.

- HTML "components" if you want to dig into HTML, CSS and all that good stuff.

- A few tutorials to help get started with physics, animation, etc.

- Free.

- Super fun! Ok, I'm highly biased as one of its creators.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#36

Post by ericd »

AstroJetson wrote: post #20
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…

I do elementary school Robotics, we program the robot in a version of scratch / blockly. There is a huge amount what you can do. The programming club does some pretty cool game things.

Are there any good starter kits that you'd recommend on the hardware side that work well with the software stack you all use?

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#37

Post by treve »

I know the authoring experience is a bit different, but I wonder if a bunch of .html files in a folder isn't a close modern equivalent.

I originally learned the basics from a book in the 90's. It was easy to get into, and those basics haven't fundamentally changed.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#38

Post by armagon »

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…

Take a look at Snap. It was originally a scratch mod, but does allows for all sorts of advanced things. https://snap.berkeley.edu

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#39

Post by Turing_Machine »

threeseed wrote: post #15

Not Hypercard but there is a company still making a Visual Basic 5 clone: https://www.xojo.com When I was young I found it a great way to get into programming since it's visual with immediate feedback.

VB 5 (and, especially, 6) were some of the best UI builders ever designed, IMO.

Yeah, there was a crap language underneath, but I've never seen anything better at whipping up a serviceable GUI in a hurry.

Back in the day I sometimes wrote the UI for Windows C and C++ programs using VB6. It was that good.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#40

Post by kjellsbells »

If your kid is already doing Scratch, Blockly is a really easy next step.

https://developers.google.com/blockly

Critically, Blockly can emit JavaScript and Python, plus it supports plugins for extended functionality. So the kid can stay inside the blockly universe for as long as they like, but easily peer under the hood and get into Python or JavaScript as soon as they like.

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