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Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

beyondloom.com

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Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#31

Post by D-Coder »

josters wrote: post #24

This reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

I'm using LiveCode for a dozen personal applications (and for just the fun of coding; I'm a retired s/w engineer). It's no longer free, but I started with HyperCard and LiveCode is an excellent replacement, at least for me.

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#32

Post by mbreese »

pjmlp wrote: post #27
mbreese wrote: post #21

Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few…

Why past tense, Filemaker and Access are still being sold. A solution would probably be Airtable.

It’s more that I haven’t really seen many examples of Access or FileMaker applications in the wild for a while. Most of these were CRUD apps that were able to be moved to the web. But that doesn’t mean that typical users are any more capable of navigating hosting setups for modern CRUD web apps.

The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.

But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.

I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#33

Post by NegativeLatency »

mbreese wrote: post #21

Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few…

an llm coding agent?

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#34

Post by scelerat »

zeroq wrote: post #15

I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing. As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook. People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applicatio…

It took browsers and web dev until, IDK, maybe 2010? to match the interactivity and capability of Hypercard circa 1994.

The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#35

Post by analog31 »

zeroq wrote: post #15

I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing. As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook. People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applicatio…

>>> And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.

This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.

By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.

HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.

Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#36

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #22
janci wrote: post #20

It seems application state is mainly maintained in the widgets. Reminds me of Delphi. Is there a similar concept for representing state in a well-suited data structures, that can be created and composed visually like the UI widgets?

Decker heavily emphasizes the concept of "reified data", representing information as tangible entities within a deck. You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications: http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images: http://beyondloom.com/decke…

Feels more like jerry-rigged SmallTalk to me. Maybe more like Rebol?

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#37

Post by Exoristos »

mbreese wrote: post #21

Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few…

SaaS seems to have largely replaced them. And, needless to say, now LLM.

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#38

Post by whartung »

mbreese wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why past tense, Filemaker and Access are still being sold. A solution would probably be Airtable.

It’s more that I haven’t really seen many examples of Access or FileMaker applications in the wild for a while. Most of these were CRUD apps that were able to be moved to the web. But that doesn’t mean that typical users are any more capable of navigating hosting setups for modern CRUD web apps. The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was…

Well thats the crux. While the display may seem simple (a grid, a few controls), a Web UI CRUD app, while routine today, is NOT simple.

While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.

And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.

It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.

You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.

Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".

It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#39

Post by andrelaszlo »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #25
donohoe wrote: post #11

I miss HyperCard and I love projects like this at a nostalgia level - but if you're going to have aspirations that this is useful today (2026) with a real project then its a complete waste of time. I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.

A lot of these modern HyperCard reinterpretations get stuck on the black-and-white aesthetics of the original. That's cool, but it limits how broadly appealing they become. Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product. A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targe…

Myst was famously built in Hypercard, but they must have worked around the limitations somehow?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

Re: Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

#40

Post by proxysna »

Never used HyperCard, but from descriptions and screenshots in the article reminds me a lot of Delphi/Pascal/Lazarus IDE’s. Appeal is understandable, because it is so cool to be snore to from a few lines of code to a clickable intractable executable, that is the sort of Feedback loop that I miss in python and go GUI builders that I’ve used previously, and why I keep c inning back to Lazarus.
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