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Why Hypercard Had to Die

loper-os.org

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Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#31

Post by wmf »

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 think he's more of a crackpot than a troll (and I think the difference matters).

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#32

Post by jawngee »

asciilifeform wrote: post #14
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.

> > the WWW was coming.

> In 1998?

I built my first HTML page in '93. NCSA Mosaic was the rage in the lab.

> > 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.

???

Drag and drop, double click to add script, how is that not the spirit of HyperCard? HyperCard was the preeminent RAD development tool. Easier than Visual Basic? Sure, but not by much. The gap between BASIC and HyperTalk is not that great a leap. If you can't see the parallels between Macromedia Director and HyperCard, you're being blinded by your own weird sense of what's what - considering they both used the same basic language back then.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#33

Post by gcanyon »

The code for this could have simpler/less verbose. It's been a while, but I believe in the number buttons this would have worked:

    put the short name of me after fld "lcd"
and in the equals sign button:

    put the value of fld "lcd" into fld "lcd"
(edited to fix a missing quote)

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#34

Post by asciilifeform »

jawngee wrote: post #32
asciilifeform wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> > the WWW was coming. > In 1998? I built my first HTML page in '93. NCSA Mosaic was the rage in the lab. > > 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. ??? Drag and drop, double click to add scrip…

Hypercard is different from systems like Director in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#36

Post by asciilifeform »

gcanyon wrote: post #33

The code for this could have simpler/less verbose. It's been a while, but I believe in the number buttons this would have worked: put the short name of me after fld "lcd" and in the equals sign button: put the value of fld "lcd" into fld "lcd" (edited to fix a missing quote)

Thanks!

Also there is an extra eval (the first one is unnecessary, I think.) But I am too lazy to revise the screenshots.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#37

Post by joe_the_user »

asciilifeform wrote: post #22
ezy wrote: post #16

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,…

> This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Tell that to the thousands of otherwise non-programming people who developed real, useful applications (some of them best-selling) in Hypercard. > it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack Like building a castle on a swamp. Foundations matter: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55

That rant is was quite nice... had me going for a minute.

But I'm sure it is one of many in a line of "reasons the software crisis didn't have to happen" - riiight. The "mythical man month"? It's 'cause they didn't do it right in 1960/1970/1980/1990/2001/... If only "they" would learn...

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#38

Post by asciilifeform »

joe_the_user wrote: post #37
asciilifeform wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Tell that to the thousands of otherwise non-programming people who developed real, useful applications (some of them best-selling) in Hypercard. > it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack Like building a castle on a swamp. Foundations matter: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55

That rant is was quite nice... had me going for a minute. But I'm sure it is one of many in a line of "reasons the software crisis didn't have to happen" - riiight. The "mythical man month"? It's 'cause they didn't do it right in 1960/1970/1980/1990/2001/... If only "they" would learn...

So doing "it" right is a physical impossibility, then? Care to say why?

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#39

Post by jawngee »

jawngee wrote: post #32
asciilifeform wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> > the WWW was coming. > In 1998? I built my first HTML page in '93. NCSA Mosaic was the rage in the lab. > > 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. ??? Drag and drop, double click to add scrip…

> Hypercard is different from systems like Director > in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.

No offense, but you're reaching for straws now. Any stack of any complexity was just as complex as the equivalent in Director. I'm not sure what you were doing in 96 or so, but I was making a living with Director after cutting my teeth with some serious SuperCard action. I wrote a precursor to AIM/ICQ for our feeble AppleTalk network with SuperCard and that was not simple at all.

I guess if you were writing simple back and forth stacks, then yes I see your argument. But anything truly useful beyond that was just as complex as anything else. I appreciate your romantic notions to the contrary however.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#40

Post by neilk »

asciilifeform wrote: post #22
ezy wrote: post #16

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,…

> This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Tell that to the thousands of otherwise non-programming people who developed real, useful applications (some of them best-selling) in Hypercard. > it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack Like building a castle on a swamp. Foundations matter: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55

I agree. The web stack is a castle on a swamp, except that swamp is itself built above a hyperspace junction linking everything in the world together.

The web surpassed HyperCard from day one, simply by locating its resources on the network. And that's why people put up with it, even if we have to dive into a fetid quagmire every time we use it.

HyperCard versus the web is a classic example of Worse is Better.

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