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Why Hypercard Had to Die

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Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#41

Post by flomo »

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,…

I wished Hypercard was the BASIC of Macintosh. However, when I tried to build something with it (a manager for the offline game Car Wars), I quickly ran into some trivial obstacle, and was told that I'd have to write a C extension. (iirc, it was the lack of a random number generator.) Enough of that.

Hypercard was mostly useful as a sort of personal wiki or address card book; I used it quite a bit as a notepad with hyperlinks. It didn't die for any real dramatic reasons. It was programmatically stuck in the 9" B&W Mac era and never quite fit onto larger color screens, so once the web came around, Apple dropped it.

Also you history is way off, because BASIC morphed into VisualBasic, which did everything Hypercard could and ten times more, and was the leading programming environment for a generation.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#42

Post by asciilifeform »

jawngee wrote: post #39
jawngee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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 A…

> I'm not sure what you were doing in 96 or so

I was a boy. A boy playing with Hypercard. As hinted at rather transparently in the article.

> But anything truly useful beyond that was just as complex as anything else.

Complexity of interface is different from complexity back-stage.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#43

Post by wvenable »

fleitz wrote: post #26
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,…

Nothing special, other than the fact that you could program a game like Myst in it.

You could program a game like Myst in almost anything -- even BASIC with line numbers.

Edit: With the same amount of effort.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#44

Post by asciilifeform »

wvenable wrote: post #43
fleitz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing special, other than the fact that you could program a game like Myst in it.

You could program a game like Myst in almost anything -- even BASIC with line numbers. Edit: With the same amount of effort.

Why not with a magnetized needle, too?

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#45

Post by resnamen »

HyperCard is very near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid I taught myself how to program with Hypercard. I'm a software developer today, and despite the crazy verbose syntax of HyperTalk, I still acquired an intuition for programming that remains helpful, 15 years later.

I actually approached Steve Jobs about the demise of Hypercard in 1998, when I was 15, at the Seybold SF conference. IIRC he gave a pretty dismissive response about it, basically saying that there wouldn't be a market for it anymore. It was pretty obvious that he didn't care about HyperCard or HyperCard-like products anymore. That, or he didn't want punk teenagers questioning his business strategy.

As a side note, I got my photo taken with him. When the photo was developed I saw that I was wearing a megawatt smile (shit, I met with Steve Jobs!), and Steve was looking distractedly at something in the corner.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#46

Post by dahjelle »

groby_b wrote: post #7

Sigh. Maybe instead of ranting at your "typical software engineer", the author should spend a moment to consider that maybe it "could be built again" - but it never has. So the question then turns to, why has it never been built? Is it maybe because Hypercard (and other visual systems) become entirely unmaintainable once we get to large-scale systems? And maybe it is because most people don't want a trivialized progr…

> They either want a full system, or just a product.

While I think this is true at the moment, it seems that there is an interesting question behind that, as well. Why don't more people want to create their own software? I do think the author has an implicit point: because, frankly, creating software stinks. Jon Skeet's talk [1] demonstrates this admirably. I spend a shockingly large part of my time working around bugs and leaky abstractions in other software rather than implementing my own ideas.

I don't know if it is possible to design a system with a solid enough abstraction that these problems don't exist. I do know that HyperCard came unusually close, as I know several folks who made HyperCard stacks who wouldn't imagine creating software in any typical fashion.

I hold out hope that such a useful system could be created again, one that gives people enough flexibility to create software solutions of their own (perhaps within a genre of software) and that is able to combat the currently-accurate stigma of programming being "hard".

[1] http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-pon...

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#47

Post by resnamen »

I think HyperCard was special in that other people's stacks were easy to come by, and easy to disassemble. There was no compiled distributable form, all stacks could be cracked open if you wanted to see how they ticked, and just modified just as easily if you wanted to see how the program's behavior would change.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#48

Post by evolve2k »

I remember making a game with hyper card when I was at school and loved that I could visually script the buttons.

We hand drew pictures of 3D rooms and then scanned them in and put big invisible buttons over the doors etc.

I personally think the www killed hyper card, suddenly you could do very similar things but have them instantly shared globally.

In my mind hypercards real innovation was creating your own links which would take you to any other card you desired, I think plain old simple HTML came along and killed the poor thing. HyperCard lived in a time of share it on a disc and I imagine Jobs seeing it's days as numbered.

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#49

Post by dahjelle »

evolve2k wrote: post #48

I remember making a game with hyper card when I was at school and loved that I could visually script the buttons. We hand drew pictures of 3D rooms and then scanned them in and put big invisible buttons over the doors etc. I personally think the www killed hyper card, suddenly you could do very similar things but have them instantly shared globally. In my mind hypercards real innovation was creating your own links wh…

Bill Atkinson, the creator of Hypercard, is on record [1] wishing he'd had the foresight to extend the links to the network. Hypercard was inches away from being the first "web browser".

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/0...

Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die

#50

Post by pnathan »

The author makes a very valid point: the modern Way of personal computing is about the controlled user experience; allowing people to get their mess all over with their own work would disrupt that Way.

Don't appreciate the crack about the 'aspie software engineer' though. Definitely not needed.

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