4 ms·

I was just reviewing Hypercard's history yesterday and realized that it's really one of many tools from that period circa 1985-1995 where everyone was driving c

I was just reviewing Hypercard's history yesterday and realized that it's really one of many tools from that period circa 1985-1995 where everyone was driving commercial dev tools towards the "RAD" paradigm and merging IDE, database, code editing, and forms editing into one Smalltalk-esque environment. Flash and Director date from this era, and other antecedents include Filemaker(still around today!) and MS Access, as well as more "code-centric" ideas like Visual Basic or Delphi. Flash survived longer than most just by developing into a Web-centric product, but for the most part, these products are old and there's room for a new generation of them. The thing that I think has held them back is that it requires a more holistic approach than is usually taken by open-source projects. It's easier to make a programming language that is dumped on top of the C/Unix environment and just accumulates power-user features over time.

scroot 8y ago
Perhaps the computing experience should be precisely the more holistic one. Hypercard is exceptional for many reasons: new users can do a lot without writing code, but can easily "see" how it works by inspecting things (in a language that is readable even for non-programmers). You can copy and paste everything. It integrated well with the system upon which it was built. It let users do what they needed to, for their own ends, without making too many assumptions -- and it did this in a highly accessible way. That should be what personal computing is all about. I think the key lesson, really, is that you need intuitive metaphors to make such things work. The idea of cards and stacks are highly intuitive in this case. It's worth booting up Sheepshaver and giving the final version of Hypercard another look. The default home stack -- complete with interactive examples and documentation that you can straight up copy and paste -- is still a marvel of design in my view.

scroot 8y ago

Perhaps the computing experience should be precisely the more holistic one. Hypercard is exceptional for many reasons: new users can do a lot without writing code, but can easily "see" how it works by inspecting things (in a language that is readable even for non-programmers). You can copy and paste everything. It integrated well with the system upon which it was built. It let users do what they needed to, for their own ends, without making too many assumptions -- and it did this in a highly accessible way. That should be what personal computing is all about. I think the key lesson, really, is that you need intuitive metaphors to make such things work. The idea of cards and stacks are highly intuitive in this case. It's worth booting up Sheepshaver and giving the final version of Hypercard another look. The default home stack -- complete with interactive examples and documentation that you can straight up copy and paste -- is still a marvel of design in my view.