81–90 of 144 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scratch is nothing like HyperCard.
It's pretty much in the same ballpark.
A closer analogy would be to the fully featured Logos you could get in the late 80s which looked like simple drawing languages on the surface, but were actually pretty full-featured LISP implementations.
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…
> forgotten realm of democratising programming This phrase reminded me of a thought I once had, that the removal of the compiler as a first-class application in user-centric OS distributions was an imperial gesture to enforce class hierarchies among end-users: you were either a user, incapable of making your computer do new things, or you are a developer, who must be convinced to make computers do new things using ru…
That said, I do agree that programming should be made more accessible. Bret Victor and others seem to be exploring new ways of doing that, besides making computing more physical:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally agree - QBasic was my first language (after DOS batch files!). The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found. Which, IIRC, was via floppy disks from my neighbor and a friend from school. The web has some of that, but the technology is just so much more complex. The difference between reading the .bas file for SNAKE vs. using the web inspector to understand h…
> The fact that it was an interpreter meant you could read all the code for any program you found. This wasn't a granted thing back then. GW-BASIC source needed to be explicitly saved in ASCII mode.
This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page. There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.
I did, still a WIP: https://dialogiconderzoek.nl/designer/demo.html
Good luck!
This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page. There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.
At the risk of courting controversy, arguably that's what Flash was: ActionScript, for example, being based on HyperTalk. Certainly it included many of the concepts originally found in HyperCard. Of course, that too has been superseded, and ironically - after many years of holding Flash in some degree of contempt - I have to admit to being rather saddened by the fact.
The Flash authoring tool was always, imho, pretty nice. The runtime had lots of issues, though.
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…
> forgotten realm of democratising programming This phrase reminded me of a thought I once had, that the removal of the compiler as a first-class application in user-centric OS distributions was an imperial gesture to enforce class hierarchies among end-users: you were either a user, incapable of making your computer do new things, or you are a developer, who must be convinced to make computers do new things using ru…
- The bundled development tools were usually still there, but they took a form that those of use who grew up with computers in the 1980s were less likely to acknowledge. Consider how web development took off soon after more traditional languages were removed.
- People are more interested in programming when new technologies appear. There are more itches to scratch, opportunities available, and the barrier to entry is lower.
- Programming simply became more complex. It used to take one line of code to do something. Between the OS and languages requiring more (initialization, boilerplate code, etc.), programming became less appealing. While tools like HyperCard addressed some of this, the distinction between "real" programs and these environments was quite clear.
All of this is driven more by the end user than by industry. And if end users are less keen on programming, why should businesses make the investment in creating tools for them?
www.livecode.com is a cross platform updated Hypercard descendant. Their free Community edition is GPL
I liked Runtime Revolution. I wish the broader coding community would taken environments like this more seriously, is the text editor sacred? I left the platform before they added more mobile+online support, I'll have to see what they have added recently.
No, it's the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to software developers, who take some existing application code and refactor it to their purpose.
I would expect a software developer to be able to write code from scratch (when necessary), but then again I'm old fashioned like that.
However, you could open up a command console in this neutered version of HyperCard, type in 'magic', and you'd be able to unlock the full set of authoring tools.
Magic indeed.