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The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

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Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#61

Post by digitailor »

noduerme wrote: post #38
DavidSJ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit. You're going to kill me with nostalgia.

aw man... I also read Mondo as a kid, and MY first mac was a IIsi!!! ResEdit, Hypercard, SuperCard (it was in color! And could compile binaries!) ... plus pirated Infini-D, Stratus, Renderman, Playmation... and a 680xxx? FPU. Sadly it seems HN love brought this site down. Web admin is probably really gonna enjoy what happened next time they check their traffic stats in a few months or years...

SuperCard was awesome too (color came so late!) but I guess a little too little for the times. Once the web started really heating up, it was all about trying to get into places that had NIX or WinNT boxes. And by '96 I was old-enough looking to get snuck into the lab with a couple of SGIs at Parsons… ;)

I ended up at a “startup” in '97 called onlinetv.com and our boxes were originally in the data center next to the NYSE and it wasn’t ludicrously expensive yet. The founder, an extraordinary Boomer who got us thrown out of the Film Center on 17th for smoking pot, moved us into the basement of a bar in the East Village called the Spiral.

Where we streamed the bands playing upstairs in potato quality and sold Troma videocassettes, because the boss had been given the rights to them. Bell Atlantic put some kind of huge hub in the basement at our request that I can’t remember the details of anymore, but we got speed

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#62

Post by incanus77 »

eggy wrote: post #52

If you want to play with a modern Hypercard, I recommend John Earnest's Decker[1]. It even has the Mac look. John created Lil, a scripting language from it that is declarative, functional, and vector oriented. He is also the creator of oK[2] an interpreter for a K-type programming language with a web interface and graphics and sound primitives. Amazing and fun stuff! [1] https://beyondloom.com/decker/ [2] https://git…

Once Decker launched, I ate it up, and especially Lil, which is super cool. But man, have you seen the source code style? It’s like minified JS, but it’s straight C. Pretty hard to visually parse.

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#63

Post by elecush »

AlbertCory wrote: post #58
pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Laporte interview: "I'm 65. I can tell things I wouldn't [have] told if I were earlier. Hypercard was inspired by an LSD trip." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18

Yeah, If he'd said that on TV in 1987, would he have been regarded as still a Mac genius, or would he have been shunned? I think it's a good question. It's not obvious to me that it would have been the end of his career, but I'd probably have done the same as he did back then. In thinking further, Stewart Cheifet would have scrapped the episode, and he might have gotten invitations to go on other, more sensationalist…

Steve Jobs openly talked about it a few times, right?

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#64

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #59
pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with many assets being built and minified ... often needlessly and even to the author's own detriment, given the need to configure (and then maintain the configuration of) the shoddy tooling that produces the blobs--and the inability to debug them directly, of course.

Minification is good for users in most ways, it’s fewer bytes on the wire and faster to parse. And I know bad tooling and config is the meme but I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how simple it’s been to adopt Vite both in new projects and now a >10 year old one. Edit: I’m just waking up and missed the point about debugging, but source maps work very well. Perhaps more sites should ship them to production t…

The key word being "directly".

Aside from that, it remains to be shown for most projects that the downsides are outweighed by the upsides (which are often theoretical or aspirational even, rather than actual).

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#65

Post by eggy »

incanus77 wrote: post #62
eggy wrote: post #52

If you want to play with a modern Hypercard, I recommend John Earnest's Decker[1]. It even has the Mac look. John created Lil, a scripting language from it that is declarative, functional, and vector oriented. He is also the creator of oK[2] an interpreter for a K-type programming language with a web interface and graphics and sound primitives. Amazing and fun stuff! [1] https://beyondloom.com/decker/ [2] https://git…

Once Decker launched, I ate it up, and especially Lil, which is super cool. But man, have you seen the source code style? It’s like minified JS, but it’s straight C. Pretty hard to visually parse.

I haven't looked at it, but I am familiar with it. I program in J and a famous story is how Arthur Whitney visited Ken Iverson and Kiln Farm and wrote an interpreter for J in terse C[1].

John Earnest is definitely a fan of array languages for sure, so I am not surprised.

[1] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#66

Post by incanus77 »

eggy wrote: post #65
incanus77 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once Decker launched, I ate it up, and especially Lil, which is super cool. But man, have you seen the source code style? It’s like minified JS, but it’s straight C. Pretty hard to visually parse.

I haven't looked at it, but I am familiar with it. I program in J and a famous story is how Arthur Whitney visited Ken Iverson and Kiln Farm and wrote an interpreter for J in terse C[1]. John Earnest is definitely a fan of array languages for sure, so I am not surprised. [1] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

Oh, this ... makes a lot of sense now?

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#67

Post by eyelidlessness »

pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #64
eyelidlessness wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minification is good for users in most ways, it’s fewer bytes on the wire and faster to parse. And I know bad tooling and config is the meme but I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how simple it’s been to adopt Vite both in new projects and now a >10 year old one. Edit: I’m just waking up and missed the point about debugging, but source maps work very well. Perhaps more sites should ship them to production t…

The key word being "directly". Aside from that, it remains to be shown for most projects that the downsides are outweighed by the upsides (which are often theoretical or aspirational even, rather than actual).

“Directly” is immaterial if every part of the tool chain supports it transparently. Which granted isn’t a given, but it’s more of a given than being able to directly debug two deep into a vanilla JS Promise.then.

As far as what remains to be shown about upsides, smaller JS packages isn’t in question. I don’t even know what resources to link which show this because it’s so fundamental that I wouldn’t know which fundamental to begin with. You’re coming from the perspective of tooling complexity being a large downside (and I agree), but it takes approximately none to minify JS. And for an even meager payload on the wire, I know my users on spotty networks or low power devices aren’t just theoretically benefiting.

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#68

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #67
pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word being "directly". Aside from that, it remains to be shown for most projects that the downsides are outweighed by the upsides (which are often theoretical or aspirational even, rather than actual).

“Directly” is immaterial if every part of the tool chain supports it transparently. Which granted isn’t a given, but it’s more of a given than being able to directly debug two deep into a vanilla JS Promise.then. As far as what remains to be shown about upsides, smaller JS packages isn’t in question. I don’t even know what resources to link which show this because it’s so fundamental that I wouldn’t know which fundam…

> “Directly” is immaterial if every part of the tool chain supports it transparently. Which granted isn’t a given

In other words, it's not immaterial (and even hinting that it might be by introducing the word in the first place is a red herring).

> it takes approximately none to minify JS

Simply untrue.

> And for an even meager payload on the wire, I know my users on spotty networks or low power devices aren’t just theoretically benefiting.

There are two issues here, both of which come down to the fact that the practice of minification doesn't exist in a vacuum:

1. HTTP payload compression is already a thing

2. There's a counterintuitive product of the industry that churns out minified JS bundles, which is that if you look at what people are actually doing, pretty much all these things end up being larger--this is approximately the same as the "low-fat/low-calorie snacks lead to overeating" phenomenon, but there's a fair bit of "lost knowledge/nobody knows how to do this stuff anymore" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko> involved, too

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