Why Hypercard had to die (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#21

Post by nabla9 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

burlesona wrote: post #5

Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard. Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was). HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.

> World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing,

This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything.

We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#22

Post by ryukafalz » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

api wrote: post #12

nabla9 wrote: post #2

>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.…

I really don't think that world does still exist, at least not quite in the same way. Even on today's Linux systems, there's a huge barrier between using the system and changing something about it. I wrote a little bit about this a while back: https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html

Suffice to say, I think many more people would make small changes that make their lives easier if if were easy and straightforward to do so as a user. Right now, it's not.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#23

Post by parasubvert » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #19

There 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 ra…

This isn’t necessarily a vendor-led phenomenon as it is a mutual conspiracy between customers and vendors.

It is a pendulum swing between different members of the industry, some that prefer complexity as the source of their job security, and those that prefer simplicity and beauty (even if there are limitations).

Arguably NeXT IB and Objective C tried to straddle both worlds (and slid into complexity over time with iOS And MacOS)

Also See: Heroku vs Kubernetes

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#24

Post by JKCalhoun » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

twobitshifter wrote: post #8

I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses. It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that…

I see it as not-invented-here. He was in love with NeXT Step because it was his.

The Apple ][ shipped with BASIC. Apple was not founded on letting you consume your computer.

But the world had changed since the 1970's and there was a software ecosystem.

Hypercard would seem to have brought programming to the masses. But by then there was a broad base of software companies that would provide users the calculator app, etc. This leaves Hypercard, like BASIC before it, a rather more beautiful and modern tool for nerds.

And you can tell Jobs always had an uneasy relationship with nerds. :-)

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#25

Post by qsort » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

api wrote: post #12

nabla9 wrote: post #2

>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.…

On one hand I'm completely with you that acting like programming is "an echo of a different world" is just romanticizing a past that never existed, but I can't help but feel there is some (and only some) truth to it.

A car is a means of transportation, the fact that you can tweak the engine is tangential to its function, a computer is useful because, and not in spite, of its universality.

There isn't any logical way of using a computer that isn't programming, but ironically, it's often a mere afterthought in commercial products. To continue the obligatory car analogy, writing complex software in a full development environment is the equivalent of tweaking the engine. It's a job for professionals and I don't expect the average user to be able to do it. But writing a simple script for the system interpreter that wires premade components is more like changing your oil or changing a tire, it's really baffling that most people can't do it.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#26

Post by parasubvert » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #21

burlesona wrote: post #5

Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard. Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was). HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.

> World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything. We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.

The Web was a gateway tech for a whole generation of “non programmers”, and for at least its first 10-15 years (through 2005 or so) you could build reasonable sites without being a programmer.

But as with all simple things in tech, there are more people whose pay depends on complexity. And so Web 2.0 rose and CSS+JavaScript became what it is today.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#27

Post by analog31 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

I loved HyperCard. A Mac with Hypercard allowed me to completely bypass the entire Windows 3.1 era. I wrote some insane things in HC. By the time HC was ready to die, Visual Basic was ready to use.

Of course it would be offensive to compare VB to HC, given that VB was worse in a lot of ways. Bear with me. ;-)

What HC did was provide an extremely limited palette of system features for you to play with. It was extensible, but only with difficulty, and there weren't many good extensions. (I used one that gave me access to the Mac serial port, and wrote one of my own that talked to a National Instruments data acquisition board). But I think the limitations were part of the secret of why it was so clean and easy to learn.

VB tried to be too much, by giving you all of the knobs and controls that let you create commercial-looking software. But you paid the price in complexity, and ultimately bloat. When VB-dot-net came along, I jumped ship and landed in the Python world.

And in the time between the introductions of HC and VB, computers got more complicated, with things like networking and databases that people wanted to mess with. And still more complicated between VB and VB-dot-net. Providing just the right degree of control for novices to write interesting programs, without exposing the ugly innards of the system, or deluging us with options, has always been the challenge of creating programming tools for the rest of us.

The rising complexity and expectations for modern computers is why it would be hard to resurrect HyperCard.

A non-obvious feature of HyperCard is that projects could be shared and distributed in source code form, meaning that there was no distinction between the development and user environments. It wasn't in text format, but a HC stack had a nearly 100% chance of working on someone else's computer without needing to worry about installers, dependencies, and so forth. And folks were encouraged to look at someone's code and learn from it.

There has always been a niche that blurs "use" and "programming," which is what is generically called "scientific programming." I work almost entirely within the Python ecosystem. I'm as happy, if not happier, than I ever was with HyperCard. A trick that I employ to deal with the complexity of the system is: Don't try to make it look and behave like real software."

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#28

Post by TetOn » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #21

burlesona wrote: post #5

Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard. Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was). HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.

> World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything. We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.

> You have to learn web programming to do anything.

Sorry, but I don't see how that is at all different than "you have to learn the Hypercard scripting language to do anything."

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#29

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

TetOn wrote: post #28

nabla9 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything. We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.

> You have to learn web programming to do anything. Sorry, but I don't see how that is at all different than "you have to learn the Hypercard scripting language to do anything."

[deleted]

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#30

Post by parasubvert » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #27

I loved HyperCard. A Mac with Hypercard allowed me to completely bypass the entire Windows 3.1 era. I wrote some insane things in HC. By the time HC was ready to die, Visual Basic was ready to use. Of course it would be offensive to compare VB to HC, given that VB was worse in a lot of ways. Bear with me. ;-) What HC did was provide an extremely limited palette of system features for you to play with. It was extensib…

This is a great point.

Also, the environment that feels most like an environment for “not really programmers but sort of if I need to” is the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem which evolved out of IPython. It’s like a spreadsheet for telling a narrative.