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ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

vipercard.net

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Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#41

Post by schoen »

ashleyn wrote: post #23

HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like. It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these…

People have written a lot about programming languages that try to use natural-language syntax, but one idea that I remember is that both HyperTalk and AppleScript are a lot easier to read than to write, because you can relatively easily use your knowledge of English to understand what the code is doing, but you can't easily use your knowledge of English to figure out how to phrase instructions in a way that the interpreter will understand. And your own praise of HyperTalk mentions its being easy to read, not easy to write. :-)

One way to experiment with this distinction might be to look at the Wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...

and read through the examples and see if you follow them. I'm sure you will.

Now, close the page and try to write a valid loop, and a valid user interaction, and a valid test for the existence of a file. I don't think you're likely to succeed unless you've actually programmed in HyperTalk recently.

But I could readily imagine that many people can learn HyperTalk more quickly or comfortably than a language without the natural language elements. Maybe part of that is the low psychological barrier to using a system that looks like it makes sense semantically, compared to learning special meanings for lots of symbols.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#44

Post by moltensyntax »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #42

Ironically, it does not work in Safari. :(

It looks like Safari implements regular expressions slightly differently, and it leads to the parser behaving differently. Hope to be addressed by the end of the week.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#45

Post by mikekchar »

shagie wrote: post #33
mikekchar wrote: post #20

If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.

In his own words: Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki WikimediaFoundation https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 at about 3:00 and on for a minute. There was a release of hypercard in ‘98 - four years after he was working on the wiki.

Thanks for that! That's a great video!

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#46

Post by [deleted] »

mikekchar wrote: post #19
kbutler wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having made extensive use of amber and green and b&w monitors, I much prefer full color. Though I dislike the recent low-contrast efforts. Keep high contrast, reduce brightness as desired for your environment.

I totally agree with this. I've spent hours and hours selecting colour palettes that give high contrast (I work on 16 colour terminals because more than 16 colours makes it really difficult to guarantee good contrast in all situations). Having said that, it's hard to beat black on white for contrast ;-) However, I think one of the reasons people like the monochromatic themes (especially white on black) is the same --…

[deleted]

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#47

Post by mikekchar »

klenwell wrote: post #22
mikekchar wrote: post #20

If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.

That's interesting. I find the wiki concept truly transformative. One of the first things I've done with almost every job I've had is set up an internal MediaWiki wiki. It's always been worth the effort even if I was the only one who bothered to contribute it for the most part. Playing with this, I was trying to figure out a practical application for it. Is it fair to say it has largely been obsoleted by things like…

Back in the olden days, I was actually paid to work on a couple of HyperCard applications. One that sticks out in my mind was training material for using the university's astronomical observatory. My job was to write a plugin to show an actual star field animation so that the students could practice finding objects in the classroom before they got to try on the real equipment. The HyperCard stack had a whole interactive simulation where you could walk into different rooms, see the control panels, click on buttons and activate knobs, etc.

I'd have a hard time thinking of anything current that's general purpose and would be able to do something of that scope. Probably Flash would be the thing you would use, but without Flash I'm not sure. The nice thing about HyperCard was that the vast majority of the work could be done by people who weren't programmers. Even for my bit, I was still a student and it wasn't really that difficult to write the plugin (stupid Mac Pascal compiler bugs aside... :-P).

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#48

Post by slededit »

schoen wrote: post #41
ashleyn wrote: post #23

HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like. It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these…

People have written a lot about programming languages that try to use natural-language syntax, but one idea that I remember is that both HyperTalk and AppleScript are a lot easier to read than to write , because you can relatively easily use your knowledge of English to understand what the code is doing, but you can't easily use your knowledge of English to figure out how to phrase instructions in a way that the inte…

The way "normal" people tend to enter into programming is by starting with some example code and modifying it to their purpose. In this sort of scenario readability is very much a benefit.

Re: ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #29
Karunamon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find amazing is that early B&W GUIs were more usable than modern material design. Most takes on Material that I’ve seen take poor use of screen real-estate, poor conveyance, and distracting/hard-to-read color choices to an art form.

I have done material design somewhat badly. I would mean a design directly from Google not someone’s reinterpretation of it. You can use it to justify your sloppyness but you could do the same thing in HyperCard.

I'd say Google is widely recognized for "taking poor use of screen real-estate to an art form" with their designs; though Material design is probably just a symptom here, the cause being the ongoing desire to dumb down applications and remove functionality.
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