Wow, that brings back some happy memories. Writing Eliza style chat bots on my Mac SE in Hypercard was a lot of fun :)
Fun fact: the best selling game Myst was developed in Hypercard!
Why Hypercard Had to Die
61–70 of 142 posts
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#62Filemaker is similar to Hypercard.. http://www.filemaker.com/
You know what's actually the product I've met with the most similarity to HyperCard? Microsoft PowerPoint. You have cards, buttons that can navigate between them in arbitrary ways, effects that can trigger on loading or unloading a card, etc. And for everything else, you have VBA, which, like AppleScript, allows buttons and fields to do arbitrary things (with generic COM objects, even!) I once wrote a full-scale Dragon-Quest-style CRPG in PowerPoint, using the cards as a scene graph; it was actually quite friendly.
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#63I think much more likely explanations than the nefarious anti-creative one given for HyperCard's death are that, to varying degrees: Steve found all HyperCard stacks he saw to be messy and confusing, not at all the functional simplicity he was looking for; HyperCard was taking engineering resources and/or money that could be better spent saving the Mac, and therefore Apple. Apple has not, in recent years, on the Mac,…
Simple programming environments have a fundamental flaw: they fool you.
Let's say we have a type of perforated balsa wood that you can just snap into pieces and glue in place. Making a dog house just went from hours to minutes! Hurrah! So you start telling everyone that this is the new way to construct buildings, but then as you get bigger structures, it starts to fall apart.
Simple programming environments fool you into thinking you into thinking your projects can scale, and the result is a mess. Hypercard was fun, but it wasn't a deep paradigm, it wasn't good syntax, and in the end, I have to say that it was good that it died.
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Because 'right' is in the eye of the beholder? It's subjective.
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#65Alan Kay's STEPS project drew some inspiration from Hypercard. I haven't gotten to try it, alas. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#66This 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
Is it not programming because the syntax is verbose? I don't know anything about hypercard, but from the example in the OP it just looks like a limited and clunky IDE with a toy programming language. Just enough to build things that are just about good enough for people with limited goals, but then again there are thousands of products like that out there.
The whole paranoid 'everybody conspires against it because it's so great' is bullshit. If it's so great, why hasn't anyone make a clone and got rich of it? It's quite obvious why: because everybody who uses it runs into its limitations very quickly, so clones add extensions, and after a few iterations it becomes too difficult for beginners. And then the next clone stands up, lather rinse repeat.
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#67I recently discovered Quartz Composer, which is included on any Mac w/ Xcode, and I was pretty impressed by its capability. IMHO it is one of the best kept secrets of the apple-verse.
While it is very different from Hypercard, it certainly provides a level of artistic expression and creative freedom that the article alludes is present in Hypercard.
When I booted up QC for the first time a few months ago, I was blown away by its awesomeness.
And then when I further explored the vibrant community out there AND the fact that it can be readily integrated into objective-c / cocoa, it's clear that Apple is very much in tune with what normal people and creative people need to express themselves on a computer. To get started, here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer and http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/graphics-and-ani... Hint: If you have Xcode installed, simply type "quartz composer" into spotlight and begin your journey.
A final note: I seem to recall but not certain that a) QC was an acquisition by Apple of a french company; and b) the original developer has moved on from Apple
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#68Sigh. 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 bu…
Lego Mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/) is kind of like Hypercard for the modern age. It's got interesting applications (robotics and automation), and an easy-to-learn programming environment. I'd say it's the perfect product for a budding geek to cut her teeth on.
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#69This 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.
> other than the fact that you could program a game like Myst in it.
As long as you knew C and could write the Hypercard extensions needed to make Myst actually work, of course.
Re: Why Hypercard Had to Die
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Mikhail Kalashnikov did not regard the 74 as an > improvement. Does that mean that it really wasn't an improvement? First you argue that popularity defines success, but then you switch gears and appeal to the inventor's opinion. Seems like the True Scotsman fallacy. If someone had upgraded the HyperCard, but the original creator(s) felt it wasn't an improvement, would you argue that it wasn't a "true HyperCard."
> If someone had upgraded the HyperCard, but the original creator(s) felt it wasn't an improvement, would you argue that it wasn't a "true HyperCard."
In fact, he implicitly does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCard