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Why Hypercard Had to Die

loper-os.org

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Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#11

Post by jawngee »

Umm, SuperCard still exists and is under active development. Even back in the day it was superior to HyperCard in every way.

My guess was that HyperCard was killed because the WWW was coming. I used SuperCard pretty heavily back in '92ish at the second college in Minnesota to get the internet (MCAD - U of M was first). I remember the rows of NeXT boxes they had, the only machines connected and I remember fumbling around with building Gopher sites as well as some basic HTML hacking, as basic as it was back then. I lost interest in HyperCard/SuperCard shortly thereafter.

But it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. I don't know that this guy had exposure to any of this hence the short sightedness and, in my opinion, miscalculation of Job's motives.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#12

Post by groby_b »

asciilifeform wrote: post #8
siglesias wrote: post #5

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? I fail to see his point. Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler, and that's part of the reason you have so many amateur apps on the App Store. Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are…

> Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler... "Simple" and "pleasant" are different things. Digging a trench deep enough to bury a car is "simple." > Has this guy played with Interface Builder lately? Yes, actually I have played with it. It makes me want to vomit. The whole NextStep stack does, in fact. Because I have used OpenGenera. And HyperCard. > if somebody has wanted t…

Broken example - the Kalashnikov is still very much available, while HyperCard is at best a historical curiosity. And it _has_ been upgraded to the AK74, which means it's a quarter century. It also has been transformed into the Type 56, the SG550 or the Galil.

Where is that progress with regards to HyperCard?

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#13

Post by jseliger »

siglesias wrote: post #5

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? I fail to see his point. Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler, and that's part of the reason you have so many amateur apps on the App Store. Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are…

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately?

This guy writes a lot of well executed but fundamentally vacuous articles; I wrote about a previous one here: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/30/computers-and-network-effects... last year. At this point, PG's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html applies to him. But you wouldn't notice as much from any individual article or submission; it's only through the collection that his tactics become apparent.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#14

Post by asciilifeform »

jawngee wrote: post #11

Umm, SuperCard still exists and is under active development. Even back in the day it was superior to HyperCard in every way. My guess was that HyperCard was killed because the WWW was coming. I used SuperCard pretty heavily back in '92ish at the second college in Minnesota to get the internet (MCAD - U of M was first). I remember the rows of NeXT boxes they had, the only machines connected and I remember fumbling aro…

> the WWW was coming.

In 1998?

> it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things.

I have used all of these, and beg to differ. The spirit of HyperCard was that of radical simplicity, and it does not live in these systems.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#15

Post by asciilifeform »

jseliger wrote: post #13
siglesias wrote: post #5

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? I fail to see his point. Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler, and that's part of the reason you have so many amateur apps on the App Store. Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are…

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? This guy writes a lot of well executed but fundamentally vacuous articles; I wrote about a previous one here: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/30/computers-and-network-effects... last year. At this point, PG's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html applies to him. But you wouldn't notice as much from any individual article or submission; it's only through the collec…

I am not a troll. Everything I write is deadly-serious.

And I do not submit my articles to this site, although I do read it when they inevitably end up here. Complain to the person who does.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#16

Post by ezy »

This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard.

Hypercard was the BASIC of the Macintosh in that it served the same niche. It certainly was not BASIC, but the idea was the same, a little language and environment that fit into the machine's environment that allowed novices (and then highly practiced novices :-)) to create stuff on the machine for other people to use.

It was killed for the same reason BASIC, in the sense of built-in 8bit micro BASIC, kind of fell to the wayside except as a way to stitch existing apps together. No one is really impressed by a calculator program anymore. Matching the capabilities of modern software is hard nowadays. It's demotivating to create a calculator program... that's it? Hypercard really can't match even JS, et al. in functionality.

I remember when it started to happen in the 16bit era. Software was already starting to get too good and too complex for a simple tool. I got an Amiga. The Amiga had a built-in BASIC -- but no one used it. Why? Because there was no fucking way you were going to recreate even the bouncing ball demo in BASIC. It wasn't going to happen. Essentially, anything you created was going to be a huge disappointment with that tool. This was not necessarily true in the 8bit days -- but from 16bit on, you either learned assembly/C or gave up. People can learn in that environment (and did), but the barrier was much higher.

Lowering that barrier while coming close to the capability of "real" software is a hard problem. Fortunately, it's coming full circle. Now that machines are powerful enough that "real" software is being written in interpreters, JS seems like it actually is the new BASIC.

I'm not totally sold on that -- because the stack is too too baroque (although, again, people do learn in that environment). Processing is perilously close but not quite there because it's so domain specific. Python comes with a lot, but doesn't fit into native environments very well. If I had to chose, I'd say it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack in the same way 8bit BASIC sat over the primitive OS at the time.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#17

Post by irrumator »

groby_b wrote: post #9
asciilifeform wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No such luck. The Web architecture inherently sucks: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/internet-haters

Take that article with a large grain of salt. Much of it has been proven wrong by now. ("HTML is where the Web starts and probably where it will end.")

Take anything from loper-os with a massive grain of salt, he is a long-term troll who has been writing these sorts of wistful but ultimately empty posts for several years now. Calling everything and everyone stupid and bloated and yearning for the good old days is his thing. I only mention this because some HN readers might not be fully aware of his history.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#18

Post by asciilifeform »

groby_b wrote: post #12
asciilifeform wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler... "Simple" and "pleasant" are different things. Digging a trench deep enough to bury a car is "simple." > Has this guy played with Interface Builder lately? Yes, actually I have played with it. It makes me want to vomit. The whole NextStep stack does, in fact. Because I have used OpenGenera. And HyperCard. > if somebody has wanted t…

Broken example - the Kalashnikov is still very much available, while HyperCard is at best a historical curiosity. And it _has_ been upgraded to the AK74, which means it's a quarter century. It also has been transformed into the Type 56, the SG550 or the Galil. Where is that progress with regards to HyperCard?

Mikhail Kalashnikov did not regard the 74 as an improvement. The project was moved forward against his objections.

And HyperCard did indeed end up reincarnated as cheap imitations, just like the Chinese Type 56. The analogy holds.

Can't comment on the other two -- small arms aren't really my field.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#19

Post by asciilifeform »

irrumator wrote: post #17
groby_b wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take that article with a large grain of salt. Much of it has been proven wrong by now. ("HTML is where the Web starts and probably where it will end.")

Take anything from loper-os with a massive grain of salt, he is a long-term troll who has been writing these sorts of wistful but ultimately empty posts for several years now. Calling everything and everyone stupid and bloated and yearning for the good old days is his thing. I only mention this because some HN readers might not be fully aware of his history.

The distinction between a "troll" and an actual human with unpopular opinions is lost on you?

You aren't the only one: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91

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