Hypercard was awesome.
Sorry to spam, but I am working on a scripting language for the web based on HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, to try to recapture that magic:
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Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
11–20 of 171 posts
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#12>HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place.
That world still exists and many of the users of this site live in it. I program my computer all the time, from scripts all the way up to whole apps and services. I run a company that writes software.
What happened is that computing became popular, vastly increasing the user base, and the majority of these new users didn't want to program any more than the average driver wants to work on the engine of their own car. They just wanted a computer to be a gadget they could use to do specific things: online interaction, spreadsheets, games, word processing, etc.
Is that bad? I don't do anything with my car but drive it (and rarely these days!). Am I missing out on the car experience?
Today's hobbyist computer market is larger than it was back in the good old days. We have an embarrassment of riches from cheap hardware (secondhand laptops that can run Linux are virtually free and there are dozens of <$50 Linux SBCs) to vast quantities of open source software available on aggregators like GitHub. There are vastly more creators than ever before. There are just orders of magnitude more passive casual users than those.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#13You have to scroll down past the last screenshot before the part of the article related to the headline begins. The rest is just filler.
The argument isn’t super clear and it is not anything resembling an official or definitive answer to the headline.
Tl;dr: the author believes that hypercard was in the way of making the Mac a consumption device, because it allowed users to make their own things instead of buying it via the Apple store.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#14Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#15If you’ve got something important to say, why say it like a mad, embittered old crank?
Because internet?
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#16On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.
This assumes Jobs was a particularly petty person.
Have you read any stories about him? Something like this wouldn't even crack the top 10 petty things Steve Jobs did.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#17Couple years ago, I wrote a commentary inspired by this post highlighting that there is a readly available HyperCard-like system called LiveCode. I went on to demonstrate the creation of the same project and some more. It is basically the same source.
https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp...
PS: I no longer work for LiveCode but I did back when I wrote that article.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#18Hypercard was awesome. Sorry to spam, but I am working on a scripting language for the web based on HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, to try to recapture that magic: https://hyperscript.org/docs Fade & Remove
Reminds me of AppleScript, which I don't miss at all.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#19There is a disturbing tendency to try to sideline imperfect, but productive and accessible programming environments in favor of both more complicated, heavyweight "real" programmer languages, or on the other extreme, extremely limited no-code/low-code solutions that are frustrating and impossible to do anything beyond toy workflows.
This ground that HyperCard or Visual Basic 6 or Flash occupied has been ruthlessly razed and salted.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#20> Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.
Eh. Making a calculator in LiveCode is a similar complexity to doing it in HyperCard:
https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_developme...
HyperCard and its successors are an accessible way to make very simple, fun little apps. You can use them to make more complex apps, but it's not significantly easier to use HyperCard than more conventional tools to do that. I think the reason HyperCard-like tools are not popular today is simply that there is little demand for such apps.