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Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

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Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#31

Post by throwanem »

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."

You could learn enough HyperTalk to do useful things inside a day - I know; I did exactly that, when I was 11 or 12 and had a chance to find out on a Mac at the museum where an uncle of mine then worked. Granted I already had experience with Apple BASIC, so wasn't a complete programming novice, but I'd never worked in a graphical environment before, and yet still managed to turn out a fairly presentable, if short, "choose your own adventure" style game with some complex world state in just a few hours.

It would be utterly risible to suggest that a child of similar age and prior experience could do the same today, starting from scratch with web technologies. Yes, you can do more with the modern web. But the initial complexity barrier is very much higher.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#33

Post by stupidcar »

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…

Those accessible programming environments tended to exhibit exponentially worsening performance and maintainability characteristics as the complexity of the system being built with them grew.

This would be have been fine, so long as these systems remained relatively simple, and were rebuilt in more heavyweight but scalable languages once they reached a certain level of complexity. But that isn't what happened. Instead, they just kept growing into twisted, unmaintainable monsters that organisations were completely reliant upon, but which were an absolute nightmare to maintain and extend.

As a result, the industry shifted to encouraging the use of "real" programming languages for everything, even the simplest systems, because the greater up-front costs were saved many times over by having a sane story for long-term maintenance and improvement.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#34

Post by dboreham »

ChrisSD wrote: post #10
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #3

On 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.

Assuming an axiom is ok.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#35

Post by api »

ryukafalz wrote: post #22
api wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think the answer to this part of it is at the bottom of that rant: the increase in complexity. The barrier you describe exists because there is so much damn complexity in modern systems, much of it unnecessary.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#36

Post by parasubvert »

throwanem wrote: post #31
TetOn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

You could learn enough HyperTalk to do useful things inside a day - I know; I did exactly that, when I was 11 or 12 and had a chance to find out on a Mac at the museum where an uncle of mine then worked. Granted I already had experience with Apple BASIC, so wasn't a complete programming novice, but I'd never worked in a graphical environment before, and yet still managed to turn out a fairly presentable, if short, "c…

Not that risable: my 11 year old has gone through the Python Crash Course book and built a basic Django pizza ordering website with a database in a day.

That’s after work his way through much of the book, of course, but... as with any complex domain, the right teacher can make a big difference.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#37

Post by masoodkamandy »

Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive.

I was a lover of hypercard. It seemed to rekindle some if the magic of AppleSoft BASIC when I moved from the Apple II to the Mac in elementary school. I remember being surprised at how difficult it was to program a Mac compared to an Apple II until I found HyperCard. It seemed full of possibility.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#38

Post by tombert »

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff.

I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, you could figure out how to make buttons and event mappings, and I thought it was so cool that you could easily animate things in the form of movie clips without having to finagle with cycling through sprites. I made simple point and click adventures, interactive menus, and once I took physics and calculus in high school, a very simple platformer. It was a lot of fun.

Nowadays the closest thing I've found for a similar level of easiness is GameMaker Studio, and I have a copy (legitimate this time :) ), and it's fun to play with, but it still feels more complicated than it needs to be. With Flash, I never had to learn about shader programming or anything like that. To be clear, I'm not trying to knock GameMaker for this, it's a great tool, it's just not as simple as Flash, for better or worse.

Obviously Flash Player needed to die, and I'm not suggesting we resurrect it. It was a horrible buggy mess a lot of the time (especially on non-Windows platforms in my experience), but I don't feel like we've really "replaced" it fully yet, at least not on the development side.

Hypercard was a bit before my time, sadly (we didn't have a working Mac in the 90s), but it looks like something I would have really enjoyed playing with.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#39

Post by mumblemumble »

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.

I think that TFA said it well, if brusquely:

> And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then read this post again.

The thing that made HyperCard great was that it wasn't very capable. Which made it approachable.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#40

Post by recursivedoubts »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #18
recursivedoubts wrote: post #11

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: https://hyperscript.org/docs Fade & Remove

Reminds me of AppleScript, which I don't miss at all.

the syntax is definitely an acquired taste for developers who come from an Algol-derived background, but it's hard to argue with the readability, even if writing it is a bit unintuitive at first

applescript is also based on hypertalk, and I believe it suffered being too wide open and unfocused

hyperscript is much more tightly focused on DOM manipulation and event handling, so my hope is that it doesn't suffer from the usability issues that can creep in when using AppleTalk

it's an experiment, so let's find out

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