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Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sch…
Well there's quite a big jump in complexity moving to python or whatever.
It's complex to even decide what to jump to, then there's setting up the environment, learning text editing and syntax, usually much more complex (and completely unfamiliar) graphics libraries, etc. And then they can't share projects so easily and aim to be curated, etc.
I like lua and love2d as the next step, as it's much simpler and cleaner than kitchen-sink Python (don't get me started on significant-whitespace), but it's still a big jump from Scratch. I wish there was a Thonny for lua though.
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#43Scratch 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…
> A web browser and javascript is fine too.
There seem to be many online environments where you can type your {html, css, javascript} code and run it. For example, MDN has one at
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/play
(Unfortunately it has advertisements... which I suppose is incentive to learn how to use custom stylesheets.)
I wish there were an offline environment like that built into firefox. You can bring up a javascript console, but it's not really a friendly development environment. And something like visual studio code is capable but large and complicated.
Unfortunately for javascript in browsers, the browser DOM is complicated and unwieldy. It's hard for beginners to figure out the right subset/features of (html, css, javascript, DOM) that they could use to create simple apps and games.
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, snap is great. Unfortunately it's far more daunting than Scratch, if only just in the number of blocks and the way they are presented, using a smaller font, etc, so it's not so good for younger kids just starting out.
But it works as a next step for sure.
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
raspberry pi's NOOBS package includes Mathematics with a free personal use license
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sch…
Well there's quite a big jump in complexity moving to python or whatever. It's complex to even decide what to jump to, then there's setting up the environment, learning text editing and syntax, usually much more complex (and completely unfamiliar) graphics libraries, etc. And then they can't share projects so easily and aim to be curated, etc. I like lua and love2d as the next step, as it's much simpler and cleaner t…
It is a big step. But the kid is now older and knows what programming overall is about. Less likely to get discouraged then. But sure, Lua will work.
I agree though that debuggers are usually too complicated - print-based troubleshooting will be enough to start with.
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#47get him a shell account on an open access Unix box. Just learning how those tools work (start with “more” and “man” “ls” and “cd”) teaches a lot about what programming really is: creating abstractions to solve problems. A shell account also gives you access to other people doing interesting things in that space. And maybe play rogue, as a treat :-)
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#48You might try out Plang, plang.is, not hypercard like but the syntax is natural language,
For the kids, they can write the the code in their own language, so non-english
Bit of self promo, as I created it
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#49Scratch 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…
> A web browser and javascript is fine too. There seem to be many online environments where you can type your {html, css, javascript} code and run it. For example, MDN has one at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/play (Unfortunately it has advertisements... which I suppose is incentive to learn how to use custom stylesheets.) I wish there were an offline environment like that built into firefox. You can bring up a…
not sure it counts as "HyperCard" but for environments there's p5js.org (https://editor.p5js.org/)
> I wish there were an offline environment like that built into firefox. You can bring up a javascript console, but it's not really a friendly development environment. And something like visual studio code is capable but large and complicated.
That seems like a day project in electron. At least to MVP. Use CodeMirror or Monaco. As long as you pass the right options you can run the user's code in an iframe in a separate process. That way you can kill it even if it has an infinite loop.
Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?
#50Surprised no one has mentioned Squeek Etoys? If its good enough for Alan Kay...? Or has Scratch completely superceded it?