17 ms·

Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)

206 points by tobr 7y ago

mgbmtl 7y ago
I also had an early accidental contact with HyperCard, and sort of learned the basics without knowing it. I was looking for something equivalent to show my 12 year old, who is into Minecraft and generally open minded about learning geeky stuff (they've had Sketch and electronics basics in school, likes to plays with LEDs, 3d print, etc). I found Sketch a bit too limited, despite a few attempts, it didn't work out for me. I don't know much about game programming, but we ended up exploring Unity 3D. There are tons of videos online, it works well under Linux, and you can do lots of different things with limited programming. Probably not perfect, it's just for playing around, but curious to hear other experiences.
- erik 7y ago
  PICO-8 might be worth investigating. It attempts to capture the experience of hacking on an 8-bit computer rather than something higher level. Also, it's cheap but not free. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
- PinkMilkshake 7y ago
  If Unity worked out well then Godot could be a good choice. It’s conceptually simpler but is still very powerful.
  - follower 7y ago
    I had just signed in to suggest Godot myself. :) For the GP, here's the Godot web site: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ While Godot has its idiosyncrasies, in terms of being a tool that made it possible to actually get something done and playable, I've been pleased with the results I've gotten from it so far. The ability to export to HTML5 in addition to desktop & mobile is great for getting a project in front of people quickly--particularly useful for things like game jams: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/sheet-em-up https://rancidbacon.itch.io/sheet-em-up (which I created as my first game jam entry :) ). Godot is also released under a MIT license and has multiple full-time developers working on it (supported in part by monthly community donations).
edtechdev 7y ago
At the bottom of the comments, a member of the Hypercard team said it was killed in 92, before Jobs returned. There still is no free development tool out there that matches what Hypercard did in terms of power and ease of use. We're still coding with languages designed for constraints that disappeared decades ago.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Visual Basic. (The non-.NET versions)
  - mysterydip 7y ago
    I still use it sometimes (and still supported in win10 believe it or not)!
    - minxomat 7y ago
      And works really well on wine. The community is still quite active: http://planet-source-code.com/vb/default.asp?lngWId=1 http://planet-source-code.com/vb/default.asp?lngWId=1
  - ksec 7y ago
    And Delphi. Somehow all the RAD Programming Languages all died around the same time frame.
- stonogo 7y ago
  There are options. Scratch comes to mind. Stacksmith is well on its way.
- SilasX 7y ago
  But what's to say it wouldn't have taken the course of HTML/CSS/JS if it ever got similarly popular?
  - scroot 7y ago
    I doubt it. When you made Hypercard stacks you did it in Hypercard. When you make websites, you make them in ... not a web browser.
enos_feedler 7y ago
I could imagine Playgrounds app turning into such a thing
TheDong 7y ago
The author seems to attribute malice to the death of Hypercard, something akin to "programmers only stand to lose value if users can help themselves". I think a far simpler explanation is not that control to the ability to program has been intentionally deprived from users, but rather that the vast majority of users have no wish to have such a tool, and that Steve Jobs recognized this. I think that some proof of this exists: Excel, Visual Basic (and its formbuilder), Applescript, Autohotkey, etc all exist. Those tools are all intentionally approachable, as was hypercard, and yet the vast majority of iphone users would not wish to deal with those tools or ecosystems. They would much prefer a company do something called "software development" and give them a working specialized application. It seems more likely to me that Hypercard was eventually seen as a dead-end, not as a threat to the existence of selling apple software. Sure, you could spend significant effort on building a tool that is powerful for novice users (letting beginners create basic automation and forms easily), but less powerful for experts (providing less powerful design, abstraction, and programming features than more typical programming languages).
- da02 7y ago
  I would agree with you and say you can even go further on how people avoid approachable tools. People were asking for something "easier" than HyperCard. Customizing software, rather than learning and programming. Something like HyperStudio "Express" instead of HyperCard. I'm guessing this is why wizards (in Word) also became popular. Though they were meant to teach people concepts, but people ended up using them to avoid learning concepts. 16:38 of this video gives more details of that time when companies started dumbing down things to fulfill customer demand: https://youtu.be/9nd9DwCdQR0?t=998 https://youtu.be/9nd9DwCdQR0?t=998 (The presenters are associated with VPRI, Alan Kay's institute.)
- Semiapies 7y ago
  It was apparently gone before Jobs got back, but the same point still stands. The people who put together accounting systems and the like in Hypercard were unusual in being willing (and having the time) to put forth the effort of building anything complex. They're almost certainly the same people who would have put something together in GW-Basic, because they needed what they were building. I'm a professional programmer, and I've got enough in my plate to be happy to let clients build some portion of things. But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway. It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation. Back when everything was on paper, a technology virtually everyone could access by reading and writing (or typing), lots of people still had specialized jobs based around creating and organizing documents within organizations. Hell, most people are perfectly able to clean and vacuum, but beyond a certain size of 9-to-5 organisation, places hire janitors.
jancsika 7y ago
1. What's the equivalent of HTML5 canvas in Hypercard? 2. Suppose there's a little dataflow drawing program somebody else wrote in Hypercard. I want to add a binding for my own transient card to pop up on keyboard shortcut, gain focus, steal all input events, then go away on another keyboard shortcut (and return input events to their original bindings). How do I do that? 3. Suppose Hypercard flourished into the 90s and early 2000s. How would this alternate-reality Hypercard have dealt with the pop-up ad problem? I'm sure there are answers to these questions. However, a theoretical Hypercard that solves them-- plus all the other myriad problems that come from existing on a weaponized internet-- would make this tech much closer to the complexity of the modern web than to the original Hypercard.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Agreed. I would also argue that spreadsheets serve much of the role that HyperCard was trying to, including many of the problems that a world built on HyperCard would have had. Enormous democratization of computing for the use-cases that can be understood without programming skills, and also enormous amounts of fragility as applications are cobbled together from loose components.
- underwater 7y ago
  That power comes at a cost. The author covers this when they say open source versions of Hypercard do too much. There is a place for a low powered/low barrier to entry programming environment. My first forays into computing were Klik n Play and VB6. They let me learn how to solve problems without being overwhelmed with the many things a real Software Engineer needs to deal with.
- wolfgang42 7y ago
  For your #2: HyperCard is primarily mouse-oriented; I don't believe there's a way to add keyboard shortcuts (without writing an XCMD in another language like Pascal). Instead you'd add a button into the other stack (probably on the background) to 'go to "UtilityStack"'. This would take you to the first card of the stack you'd created, which naturally takes over since it's the one being shown (no need to explicitly 'steal' events). Once you're done there, either use Go > Back (Cmd+B, I believe) or have a button on the card with the script 'go back'. This takes you to the previous card the same way that the back button in your browser would, and likewise events now go to that card with no explicit rebinding required.
NikolaeVarius 7y ago
The fallout from being able to used to cause people to suffer brain damage when opened also probably contributed
_bxg1 7y ago
This is a pretty incendiary and bitterness-laden rant. I enjoyed the trip back in time but the last paragraph, for me, pretty much nullified any actual points the author was trying to make.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I empathize with your feelings, but iobjectively, if an author makes three good points and then pours toxic emotional sewage all over them, the good points are still the gooid points. We may not want to read the author esposuing them any further, who needs toxic sewage? But the sewage cannot nullify a point that we recognize as true. Its truth is independent of whether the author is a goofd or bad person. Its truth is independent of whether the author argues it well or poorly. It's unfortunate when good points get covered in toxic emotions. I wouldn't say that we should read such things whether we like it or not, but having read them, I say we take the good points and repackage them in less vitriolic prose.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    It undermines his judgement. He makes sweeping, subjective arguments, which isn't inherently a bad thing but it means those arguments are more than just cold facts. The amount of heated emotion he apparently has around this subject means that his ability to draw conclusions from "soft" information is compromised.
  - egdod 7y ago
    If we’re talking about a syllogism, fine. If we’re talking about some mixture of logic with historical recollections, suppositions about other peoples’ state of mind, etc... the narrator starts to matter more. If I can trust him to be objective and reasonable, it weakens the piece.
- Retra 7y ago
  Points made through the application of logic can't be nullified by a failure to appeal to emotion. The writing style may not be optimal for building consensus, but that won't make it invalid.
- 7y ago
z3t4 7y ago
Business and engineering rarely goes hand in hand. So you made something that never wear and tear, boss orders you to redo the formula so it has to be replaced more often, resulting in more sales. Or you made something that enables the user to create infinitely amounts of what your company sell, boss tells you to erase all copies of it. etc.
japanoise 7y ago
Loper-os seems to suffer from the same problems as a lot of "unix hater"/lisp weenie types: while he does point out real flaws in the computing of today, he seriously lacks in a competent, coherent, non-vaporware alternative. His blog is now nothing but bloviating about bitcoin
- invalidOrTaken 7y ago
  As a not-fully-recovered Lisp weenie, I give a lot more slack to other wild-eyed idealists than I used to. Like, he's not wrong. I also had a HyperCard experience about that age, and it definitely was a significant factor years later. So he doesn't have an alternative. So what? Do you have one for cancer? It's still worth something to avoid Stockholm Syndrome.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JadeNB 7y ago
  If you need to use the term "sniveling digital trendoids", then your argument probably isn't as good as you think it is. (The author, not you.)
- asciilifeform 7y ago
  Author of linked site speaking. Are you sure you are reading the same page? I had half a dozen articles re Bitcoin, the last in 2014...
  - japanoise 7y ago
    Your most recent article, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3440 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3440 is tagged bitcoin, and in fact if I click on the tag, I see an awful lot of articles written in the last few months http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=42 http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=42
    - asciilifeform 7y ago
      I do have a multi-chapter series on constant-time integer arithmetic -- indeed tagged incl. "bitcoin", as it is meant to be used in (among other places) a rework of the client. You evidently spent at most 3 seconds reading the link; wouldn't kill you to spend 5 seconds and see what is behind the tag.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657.
crb002 7y ago
How hard would it be to port HyperCard to Qt? No reason we can't have it back.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  If the LiveCode people can get HyperCard running on *nix, I'm sure HyperCard could be ported to Qt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
slowmovintarget 7y ago
Amid the ranting, the one thought-provoking statement was this: > The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. HyperCard made Macs function as personal computers (the original notion behind the term) and not as digital appliances (video editors, gaming rigs, media boxes... etc.)
- eridius 7y ago
  All programming environments do that. And Apple continues to this day to give away a free programming environment for your Mac.
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    All programming environments do that for programmers. Not all do that for people who aren't software developers. Case in point: Some of the finance people I work with build incredible spreadsheets. Formulas upon formulas that turn their special spreadsheet into what is really an application. They're programming, but that isn't how they think about it (I've asked). They're just Excel power users. HyperCard aficionados were the same way. They were programming with the assumption that they just knew HyperCard really well. You wouldn't be able to sit Douglas Adams (were he alive) in front of XCode and get the equivalent of his HyperCard stack out: https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode The reason is that it requires a dramatically higher investment to create in XCode. "Just learn Swift" doesn't really cut it as an alternative.
    - scroot 7y ago
      It was even clear from the terminology: anyone who made stacks in Hypercard was called an "Author" -- which comprised both "developers" AND users. That naming couldn't be more to the point about the intention of the system.
vincent-toups 7y ago
May as well plug a similar article I wrote like 10 years ago now: https://procyonic.org/blog/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk/ https://procyonic.org/blog/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk/ I actually passed a few emails back and forth with Alan Kay for this. I short version of this piece appeared as a letter to the editor in the New Yorker, too.
- carapace 7y ago
  > The certificate for procyonic.org expired on Thursday, June 6, 2019. > Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    Oops! Thanks for the heads up!
api 7y ago
It's a special case of a more general trend: the complete abandonment of what were once called RAD (rapid application development) tools. Microsoft also killed WYSIWYG Visual Basic (pre-dotnet), quite possibly the most productive GUI builder ever made. Not quite as clean as hypercard, but another example of that bygone era when the user was the customer and not the product. The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, and it seems pretty solidly locked in. Still I do see a push to replace spreadsheets with opaque SaaS tools that do specific things.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  My first real software dev job was with Visual Basic 3.0, then Delphi 1.0. This World Wide Web thing was about to happen, but hadn't quite yet. Compuserve was where the cool kids hung out, and I ran a WildCat BBS with a buddy out of his basement. RAD was rad, for a while.
  - mycall 7y ago
    WWW was in effect for many years before 1995, although that was its take off year.
- pac39 7y ago
  Basically the cloud killed it. As more and more apps started moving to the cloud, there was a lesser need for local app development tools. The GUI development tools of today look like the ruins of a once great programming civilization of 90s.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  VB.NET is still very productive and outside HN bubble I keep seeing people adopting it when their Excel sheets with VBA macros aren't no longer enough for what they do.
- devnulloverflow 7y ago
  > The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, Well that and, Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Perl, Awk, Sed, .... I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if command lines hadn't stopped evolving in the '90s.
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
When Hypercard was new, you could use it to create user interfaces that looked and felt exactly like all the other Macintosh applications of the era- within a reasonable margin, anyway. Basic expectations are now higher. UIs are more visually complex and subtle. You can't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures. UIs are expected to reflow to devices with different screen sizes and dot pitches. Users expect their programs to give them up-to-the-minute information from the internet, with slick animation and nuanced typography. With flexibility comes inescapable complexity. Could you make a tool as easy to use as Hypercard, and let modern users create useful applications for themselves? Sure, but the results wouldn't be nearly as nice as the applications built with conventional tools that live alongside them. I have a tremendous fondness for Hypercard, but I don't think you could ever make something today which was empowering and full-featured like Hypercard was for its day.
- justinator 7y ago
  You can't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures. I mean, why not? If I'm a small business, and I need a custom (in-house) app, AND I could do it myself with little training, I'd rather do that then not have the business. (Again) how many businesses run on Excel Spreadsheets? Not every business can hire a programming firm to make a boutique app that's used by 100 people. But I'm also one of those, "Why did FileMaker Pro die?" kinda person. And I still write Perl. I'm a weirdo, but I'm a pragmatic weirdo that likes to get stuff done.
  - scroot 7y ago
    I do a lot of freelance and I can't tell you how many businesses I've worked with who had some need that was just a smidge more than their current software would allow. If there was something in between using an interface and learning a full-fledged programming stack from first principles, it would go a long way. Part of this goes towards getting people -- both today's mainstream developers and users -- to think hard about what using a personal computer should mean. I can't think of a better definition of programming than "telling a computer what to do." That should be the first hint.
jdlyga 7y ago
I spent a lot of time as a 7 year old playing around with Hypercard. Gave me a lot of good early exposure to building interfaces.
II2II 7y ago
There were many reasons why Hypercard died: Hypercard was very much a product of it's time. Software was far less complex so it was much easier to create a general purpose development tool for end users. The author argues that attempts to recreate Hypercard try to do too much, that is because users expect more of software today. To give you an idea of what I mean: I used Hypercard to create a cookbook for a family member in the mid-1990's. You could enter recipes, search for recipes, and even export them to HTML. While this would have been an amazing accomplishment a few years earlier, the program was a relic of a bygone era the moment that it was written. Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, may have been possible but would have required extensions to the language. Plenty of extensions existed, which is how companies like Cyan managed to produce an amazing for the time multimedia game (Myst) on what most people viewed as a stack of programmable black and white index cards. Yet extending Hypercard to reflect the technology of the 1990's would have transformed a product for everyone to an incomprehensible mass for anyone aside from developers. And the 1990's were primitive compared to the 2010's, never mind the coming 2020's. In a similar vein, people's interests changed. The mid-1990's brought the web, so people were far more interested in developing for the web. The early days of web development were quite accessible, was focused upon content (much as Hypercard was) and allowed people to embed programs within that content (much as Hypercard did). While Hypercard may have been better for some things and certainly provided a better development environment, it was also obsolete. As much as I loved Hypercard, the reality is that it was neglected rather than buried. It's longevity could have been improved without increasing complexity, such as adding colour or allowing multimedia files to be embedded (without resorting to third-party extensions). On the other hand, it would have died off eventually. The trajectory of web development shows how a once simple and accessible platform can become so complex that it takes a dedicated student to learn.
- scroot 7y ago
  Another thing to think about is the metaphors used. Stacks, cards, and interactive objects on cards were really good metaphors that fit holistically in the Apple personal computing systems of the late 80s/90s. You're right that a lot of the computing environment has changed (eg the Internet is like a natural resource and should be assumed). Whether it is needfully more complex is another matter. A key question for designers today is this: what are the metaphors that would work for today's computing environments in a similarly holistic way, allowing users to become "authors"? This is something different than a modern Hypercard clone. I think when people want that old "Hypercard feeling," what they really want is this holistic nature, power, and ease of use for regular users -- not simple clones of the old thing.
redleggedfrog 7y ago
His acknowledgement of the elephant in the room ("... shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS...") is prescient for 2011. Today it's even worse. How many versions of lipstick on pig are we to endure (Backbone, Angular, React, Vue..., Bootstrap, less, sass...) before someone actually makes a sane UI development toolkit? Think of the children.
- carapace 7y ago
  > a sane UI development toolkit? Elm-lang, IMO.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Elm is sane but IMO not ready and may not be for years. Breaking changes each version, plus a lot of boilerplate have moved me off Elm to preferring TS/React even though I love FP
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  The problem is the web was designed for documents not apps. And JS wasn’t designed for what it does now. The closest thing we had to a sane development toolkit was Adobe Flex. Someone came up with that and it was ok. But other more powerful forces particularly Apple made it disappear. Google is in charge now maybe it’s up to them.
  - devnulloverflow 7y ago
    But a lot of the web is in fact serving documents, and using complicated apps to do it. It's not surprising, as the two categories do really merge into one another. A web store is certainly an app -- but it's also the modern equivalent of an store catalogue, which is a document.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Here's what Atkinson said about it in 2002: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have-been/ https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have-been... More clues in this (2016?) Twit interview (including the phrase 'Sculleystink' at about 16m in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdByDjhClU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdByDjhClU
- Torwald 7y ago
  I am a fan of Leo, but he also tends to fall on my nerves with constantly interrupting people. Atkinson is great in just not letting that happen, FUN!
drngdds 7y ago
"If you disagree with my barely-argued opinion, you're autistic" isn't a great way to close an article
rmrfrmrf 7y ago
From my perspective, HyperCard lives on in 2 distinct branches: webapps and PowerPoint.
mgamache 7y ago
I tried to get a license for SuperCard (it had color), but had to use resedit + HyperCard to add color textures... Miss those days (not so much) off topic (but same era) I loved MacProject... yet another Claris step child software. Moof! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacProject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacProject)
mgamache 7y ago
Hey I just noticed that SuperCard is still alive and offers HyperCard migrations: https://www.supercard.us/ https://www.supercard.us/ (SuperCard was a commercial HyperCard alternative)
nlawalker 7y ago
Hypercard's "letting regular people build useful things" ethos lives on in IFTTT, Zapier and Microsoft Flow. In 2019, it's not super useful to many people to be able to mush together some buttons and textboxes into a desktop UI, but it's fantastically useful to be able to mush together their email, calendar, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify, Alexa, home automation etc.
- rtpg 7y ago
  The fact that stuff that used to be on local files is now inside these various services makes it _much harder_ to bootstrap together simple programs I think. Though on the other hand if you leverage some other automation tools you can avoid figuring out how to auth to various systems yourself. You just end up contributing to the "everything is connected by duct tape" nature of modern software
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Sorta, kinda, not quite. That's the problem with SaaS - they take your data, silo it up, and expose through highly limited and tightly controlled APIs. Sure, I can make IFTTT save a copy of every picture I upload to Facebook into my Dropbox account (or at least I could, I think it broke). But I can't make it save that picture in original size, because someone didn't expose some option, or an endpoint. Or I can't make IFTTT save all the reactions to my post into a CSV in the format: <<datetime, which post, who, what reaction>>, because such endpoints again aren't exposed or integrated. Etc. I get that IFTTT & folks are doing the best they can, but the companies they're trying to "mush together" made their money on preventing interoperability, so it's still very far from both what could be and what used to be possible.
  - alexis_read 7y ago
    You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter. https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/
mgamache 7y ago
Okay this may be unpopular, but I felt like Microsoft VB 3.0 (for me) was a better version of HyperCard on a worse platform.
galaxyLogic 7y ago
I think Web killed Hypercard. Hypercards were kind of components and that was their power. Create onbe card at a time then connect them together. But so were/are web-pages. But you could not connect a hyper-card to another card created by another author executing on another machine. That was the mind-blowing concept of web and it quickly became clear that that is what we wanted to do, not dabble with our own stack of "hyper" cards. For one thing web was not tied to Apple hardware
malicioususer11 7y ago
HyperCard was BS. As an example, the game "Manhole" lacked features, was impossible to understand or interact with, and came with no manual whatsoever that I can recall. Doomed technology that no developer could ever successfuly work with. Good Riddence. >:3
PeterStuer 7y ago
Hypercard was obsoleted by the www. To survive it would have had to become a visual HTML editor. If you are looking inside the Microsoft backcatalog it is not VB that was the Hypercard heir, it was Frontpage for consumer-and Infopath for business applications.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dusted 7y ago
This autist understand why hypercard was a good idea, and also, the author is an asshole. [edit] So This got flagged.. Because somehow it's entirely acceptable to say "If you don't understand X, you're an autist" ? fuck that. Would it have been just as okay for the author to write "And if you don't get that, you're gay" ?
LeoPanthera 7y ago
archive.org now has the ability to run uploaded Hypercard stacks in your web browser. Example: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_autodiagnostics-25 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_autodiagnostics-25
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tluyben2 7y ago
LiveCode is pretty nice. If you want something fast & crossplatform it is kind of hard to beat. I find the language awful (far too verbose for my taste) but I would say most people here would have that going in 1 to a few days to be productive. The forum is active and people answer fast when stuck.
dantondwa 7y ago
When I was a kid, at the beginning of the 00s, and I was beginning to experiment with computers, I imagined the future of computing to be about reducing the complexity of software development as much as possible. I now realize that I dreamt of something exactly like HyperCards. A world where machines could be programmed using something resembling natural language and where anyone could create and share software. At the time, the closest thing I could find was a Word document where I dragged and dropped buttons to create a pseudo UI and then imagine that it worked. I wish I had access to something like this. I believe that by not having a tool like this, we are taking away from the majority of the population, and in particular the young, the possibility of shaping computers for their own needs. A decision has been taken: the user has to be a passive consumer. It's a mistake and I am really sad about it. It feels, to me, as if there was a decision, intentional or not, of keeping the creation of software as a privilege of a few and not a right of everyone.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > It feels, to me, as if there was a decision, intentional or not, of keeping the creation of software as a privilege of a few and not a right of everyone. It feels that way because that's exactly how it is. If users are creating their own tools and forging their own path it becomes much harder to sell them things and developers aren't in nearly as much demand either. So the groups in the best position to make tools that empower the user are disincentivised to do so. Theoretically, FOSS would take care of this, right? Only, the people making those tools are quite often also professional developers and so have pretty much the same disincentive. They're ok with making other developers' lives easier, but users? Better remove a few more features from Nautilus lest they get the idea they own their own computer.
  - scroot 7y ago
    It takes a lot of brains, time, money, failure, and just plain screwing around to come up with something like Hypercard or even the earliest personal computing systems. FOSS doesn't allow the time and money part, which is why they are stuck in making "open" tools for advanced teletype emulation. It is not a coincidence that Atkinson made this as an Apple fellow, where he had resources to work on whatever he wanted and could make whatever demands he wanted (and likewise not surprising that Apple could never make HC "profitable")
ptx 7y ago
Where is the eval call in the hypertalk script? Is it "value of" applied to a string, i.e. "value of value of card field"? (I assume it's not simply "value of" since that doesn't seem like it would work for the operator buttons in the example - or does "/" or "+" evaluate to itself?) This seems like a good reason to kill the language at least, in the Internet-connected era. In a language that's supposed to read like English, eval should be "dangerously execute untrustworthy text from ... as program instructions" or something, not a polymorphic call to a common operator accidentally applied to the wrong type.
jakobegger 7y ago
Hypercard was a very general purpose app, but it was a bit of a "jack of all trades, master of none". I loved Hypercard, but it was never really an actual good solution for any of the things you may want to do with it. 1) Lots of people tried to use it for making games, but anyone who tried quickly ran into its limitations. There were a handful of neat Hypercard games, but when I tried to see how they were made, I saw that they made heavy use of XCMDs and XFCNs -- custom extensions you had to write in a compiled language (Pascal? C?). At that point, why would you bother with Hypercard at all? 2) Another common use case were simple databases, like an address book, or a stack for all your music cassettes, or something like that. But it lacked search tools and a way to work with bulk data, so it wasn't really a good solution for databases. Filemaker was much better for databases. 3) Or you could use it for simple specialized calculators, like a currency converter. But it was a lot of work to set it all up correctly, and Excel was actually a lot more useful for these kinds of tasks.
- scroot 7y ago
  > I saw that they made heavy use of XCMDs and XFCNs -- custom extensions you had to write in a compiled language (Pascal? C?). At that point, why would you bother with Hypercard at all? Hey, don't forget about shareware culture! You didn't need to code up these XFCN/XCMDs yourself. You could try and buy them! There was a whole ecosystem of developers making these things (WindowMaker anyone?) and it worked pretty well for what it was.
lioeters 7y ago
Another article that pops up regularly on HN, on this relevant topic: The coming war on general-purpose computing (previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364) There are a number of admirable attempts to create the "next Hypercard" on the web. I haven't encountered one that really sticks, but as an old(er) timer who remembers the earlier era of personal computers - where the user was really the user, not "used" - I see that it's an important dream to keep alive, especially in our current cultural context of an increasingly exploitative web.
genuineDSD 7y ago
Uhm, I have grown up with Macintoshs and I still use them. So, my comment has at least double the emotional intensity compared to the author's. ;-) In all seriousness, I say this because it is clear that his post is mostly based on an emotional attachment to a tool, not on critical thinking. Maybe I misunderstood, but if I understood him correctly, the premise is that Hypercard would still be around if it did not collide with Steve's vision of a world of dumb users and smart engineers. This is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. Are you willing to learn? First, Hypercard was created when 13" 256-color displays were state of the art (actually even earlier) and there were exactly two devices to interact with your Macintosh: a keyboard and a mouse. So, for simple tasks, it was quite easy to create a tool that would allow you to stick together a simple program using clicks and a verbose scripting language. Nowadays, however, general purpose applications are supposed to work on a variety of devices, from 4" phones with touchscreens to desktop-Macs supporting 27"+ screens being used with traditional keyboards and mice. Maybe this will change in the future, but if you want to precisely describe a structure (GUI-compontents) in a generalized fashion, a textual representation (e.g. react-components), so far, is just superior to any GUI-tool that is around. When hypercard was created, VCS (such as git, svn, etc.) weren't really a thing. Most software was developed in about the same way as you created Hypercard projects: You made changes to your main copy and that's that. Today, you don't even think about starting a software project without having vcs in place. Similarly, when Hypercard was created, many software methodologies weren't a thing: Unit Testing, Integration testing, etc. Now, I am a software engineer, and while I never wrote Hypercard applications myself, I once found myself maintaining an Filemaker-Application. Filemaker, I reckon, is very similar to Hypercard in that you plug together your app using a GUI and some overly verbose, pseudo-simple scripting language. And, needless to say, this was an absolute disaster: In the beginning, it was a simple tool that automated a couple of tasks and it was created in a very short period of time, thanks to the easy-of-use of Filemaker. However, as with all other tools, it grew in complexity. Now, ever tried to track changes in the source code using Filemaker-files? Ever tried to unit test Filemaker-code? And don't get me started with the absolute ludicrous idea to use programming languages that resemble a natural language. Claiming that this is as effective as using an abstract language is akin to describing complex mathematical facts using only a natural language—while possible, it is completely unfeasible.
soapdog 7y ago
Hey, I took some time to write a reply to that post showing a modern day alternative: https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hypercard.html https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp... I posted another comment linking to a modern day HyperCard that was downvoted without any explanation? I don't understand why it happened. Can someone tell me?
gdubs 7y ago
Owning a Mac was a very self-selective thing back in the day, and at the time the “bicycle for the mind” ethos was a deep part of Apple’s marketing. HyperCard fit that perfectly. So, if you had the money and inclination to buy a Mac, you were also buying into a philosophy and a promise. That meant that regular people, not professional developers, were engaged and interested in making the most of their (expensive) machines. HyperCard was simple to use, and the return on investment in learning how to build with it was immediately clear. Imagine you’re a botanist with the spare money to buy a Mac. You could spend a few hours with HyperCard and put together a beautiful plant database, full of pictures and hyperlinks. I love those kinds of stories from the HyperCard era, and it’s a vision of the power of computing that still resonates today, and is a big reason why stories on HyperCard are perennially popular. In today’s smartphone era we have millions of pre-made apps ready to consume and use. It’s amazing in many ways, but if you think Xcode, or JavaScript and HTML are the natural successors to HyperCard than you don’t really understand what was so magical about HyperCard.
asciilifeform 7y ago
Author of linked piece speaking. Seems like many readers continue to miss the essential point, just as they did in 2011: Hypercard wasn't a gem of graphic design (1-bit colour, plain line graphics) or of programming language design (one of the many laughable attempts at "natural language programming") or of high-performance number crunching... but it was simple. I.e., the entire system was fully covered by ~100 pages of printed manual. It fit in one's head. (And did not take 20 years to fit-in-head, either, an intelligent child could become "master of all he surveys" in a week or two.) Where is the printed manual for the current MS VB, or the WWW's HTML/JS/CSS/etc stack (yes including all browser warts), or for any of the other proposed "replacements" ? How many trees would have to be killed to print such a manual, and would it fit in your house? Could you read it cover to cover, or would die of old age first?
- 314 7y ago
  Do I recognize your name and writing style from Kuro5hin?
  - asciilifeform 7y ago
    Doubt it: I have not written at Kuro5hin. (Possibly linked there at some point, however?)
dnicolson 7y ago
I wonder why there was a "Scripting language" dropdown menu, was anything but HyperTalk ever possible?

206 points by tobr 7y ago

I also had an early accidental contact with HyperCard, and sort of learned the basics without knowing it. I was looking for something equivalent to show my 12 year old, who is into Minecraft and generally open minded about learning geeky stuff (they've had Sketch and electronics basics in school, likes to plays with LEDs, 3d print, etc). I found Sketch a bit too limited, despite a few attempts, it didn't work out for me. I don't know much about game programming, but we ended up exploring Unity 3D. There are tons of videos online, it works well under Linux, and you can do lots of different things with limited programming. Probably not perfect, it's just for playing around, but curious to hear other experiences.

erik 7y ago
PICO-8 might be worth investigating. It attempts to capture the experience of hacking on an 8-bit computer rather than something higher level. Also, it's cheap but not free. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
PinkMilkshake 7y ago
If Unity worked out well then Godot could be a good choice. It’s conceptually simpler but is still very powerful.
- follower 7y ago
  I had just signed in to suggest Godot myself. :) For the GP, here's the Godot web site: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ While Godot has its idiosyncrasies, in terms of being a tool that made it possible to actually get something done and playable, I've been pleased with the results I've gotten from it so far. The ability to export to HTML5 in addition to desktop & mobile is great for getting a project in front of people quickly--particularly useful for things like game jams: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/sheet-em-up https://rancidbacon.itch.io/sheet-em-up (which I created as my first game jam entry :) ). Godot is also released under a MIT license and has multiple full-time developers working on it (supported in part by monthly community donations).

edtechdev 7y ago

At the bottom of the comments, a member of the Hypercard team said it was killed in 92, before Jobs returned. There still is no free development tool out there that matches what Hypercard did in terms of power and ease of use. We're still coding with languages designed for constraints that disappeared decades ago.

sansnomme 7y ago
Visual Basic. (The non-.NET versions)
- mysterydip 7y ago
  I still use it sometimes (and still supported in win10 believe it or not)!
  - minxomat 7y ago
    And works really well on wine. The community is still quite active: http://planet-source-code.com/vb/default.asp?lngWId=1 http://planet-source-code.com/vb/default.asp?lngWId=1
- ksec 7y ago
  And Delphi. Somehow all the RAD Programming Languages all died around the same time frame.
stonogo 7y ago
There are options. Scratch comes to mind. Stacksmith is well on its way.
SilasX 7y ago
But what's to say it wouldn't have taken the course of HTML/CSS/JS if it ever got similarly popular?
- scroot 7y ago
  I doubt it. When you made Hypercard stacks you did it in Hypercard. When you make websites, you make them in ... not a web browser.

enos_feedler 7y ago

I could imagine Playgrounds app turning into such a thing

TheDong 7y ago

The author seems to attribute malice to the death of Hypercard, something akin to "programmers only stand to lose value if users can help themselves". I think a far simpler explanation is not that control to the ability to program has been intentionally deprived from users, but rather that the vast majority of users have no wish to have such a tool, and that Steve Jobs recognized this. I think that some proof of this exists: Excel, Visual Basic (and its formbuilder), Applescript, Autohotkey, etc all exist. Those tools are all intentionally approachable, as was hypercard, and yet the vast majority of iphone users would not wish to deal with those tools or ecosystems. They would much prefer a company do something called "software development" and give them a working specialized application. It seems more likely to me that Hypercard was eventually seen as a dead-end, not as a threat to the existence of selling apple software. Sure, you could spend significant effort on building a tool that is powerful for novice users (letting beginners create basic automation and forms easily), but less powerful for experts (providing less powerful design, abstraction, and programming features than more typical programming languages).

da02 7y ago
I would agree with you and say you can even go further on how people avoid approachable tools. People were asking for something "easier" than HyperCard. Customizing software, rather than learning and programming. Something like HyperStudio "Express" instead of HyperCard. I'm guessing this is why wizards (in Word) also became popular. Though they were meant to teach people concepts, but people ended up using them to avoid learning concepts. 16:38 of this video gives more details of that time when companies started dumbing down things to fulfill customer demand: https://youtu.be/9nd9DwCdQR0?t=998 https://youtu.be/9nd9DwCdQR0?t=998 (The presenters are associated with VPRI, Alan Kay's institute.)
Semiapies 7y ago
It was apparently gone before Jobs got back, but the same point still stands. The people who put together accounting systems and the like in Hypercard were unusual in being willing (and having the time) to put forth the effort of building anything complex. They're almost certainly the same people who would have put something together in GW-Basic, because they needed what they were building. I'm a professional programmer, and I've got enough in my plate to be happy to let clients build some portion of things. But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway. It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation. Back when everything was on paper, a technology virtually everyone could access by reading and writing (or typing), lots of people still had specialized jobs based around creating and organizing documents within organizations. Hell, most people are perfectly able to clean and vacuum, but beyond a certain size of 9-to-5 organisation, places hire janitors.

jancsika 7y ago

1. What's the equivalent of HTML5 canvas in Hypercard? 2. Suppose there's a little dataflow drawing program somebody else wrote in Hypercard. I want to add a binding for my own transient card to pop up on keyboard shortcut, gain focus, steal all input events, then go away on another keyboard shortcut (and return input events to their original bindings). How do I do that? 3. Suppose Hypercard flourished into the 90s and early 2000s. How would this alternate-reality Hypercard have dealt with the pop-up ad problem? I'm sure there are answers to these questions. However, a theoretical Hypercard that solves them-- plus all the other myriad problems that come from existing on a weaponized internet-- would make this tech much closer to the complexity of the modern web than to the original Hypercard.

_bxg1 7y ago
Agreed. I would also argue that spreadsheets serve much of the role that HyperCard was trying to, including many of the problems that a world built on HyperCard would have had. Enormous democratization of computing for the use-cases that can be understood without programming skills, and also enormous amounts of fragility as applications are cobbled together from loose components.
underwater 7y ago
That power comes at a cost. The author covers this when they say open source versions of Hypercard do too much. There is a place for a low powered/low barrier to entry programming environment. My first forays into computing were Klik n Play and VB6. They let me learn how to solve problems without being overwhelmed with the many things a real Software Engineer needs to deal with.
wolfgang42 7y ago
For your #2: HyperCard is primarily mouse-oriented; I don't believe there's a way to add keyboard shortcuts (without writing an XCMD in another language like Pascal). Instead you'd add a button into the other stack (probably on the background) to 'go to "UtilityStack"'. This would take you to the first card of the stack you'd created, which naturally takes over since it's the one being shown (no need to explicitly 'steal' events). Once you're done there, either use Go > Back (Cmd+B, I believe) or have a button on the card with the script 'go back'. This takes you to the previous card the same way that the back button in your browser would, and likewise events now go to that card with no explicit rebinding required.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

The fallout from being able to used to cause people to suffer brain damage when opened also probably contributed

_bxg1 7y ago

This is a pretty incendiary and bitterness-laden rant. I enjoyed the trip back in time but the last paragraph, for me, pretty much nullified any actual points the author was trying to make.

braythwayt 7y ago
I empathize with your feelings, but iobjectively, if an author makes three good points and then pours toxic emotional sewage all over them, the good points are still the gooid points. We may not want to read the author esposuing them any further, who needs toxic sewage? But the sewage cannot nullify a point that we recognize as true. Its truth is independent of whether the author is a goofd or bad person. Its truth is independent of whether the author argues it well or poorly. It's unfortunate when good points get covered in toxic emotions. I wouldn't say that we should read such things whether we like it or not, but having read them, I say we take the good points and repackage them in less vitriolic prose.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  It undermines his judgement. He makes sweeping, subjective arguments, which isn't inherently a bad thing but it means those arguments are more than just cold facts. The amount of heated emotion he apparently has around this subject means that his ability to draw conclusions from "soft" information is compromised.
- egdod 7y ago
  If we’re talking about a syllogism, fine. If we’re talking about some mixture of logic with historical recollections, suppositions about other peoples’ state of mind, etc... the narrator starts to matter more. If I can trust him to be objective and reasonable, it weakens the piece.
Retra 7y ago
Points made through the application of logic can't be nullified by a failure to appeal to emotion. The writing style may not be optimal for building consensus, but that won't make it invalid.
7y ago

z3t4 7y ago

Business and engineering rarely goes hand in hand. So you made something that never wear and tear, boss orders you to redo the formula so it has to be replaced more often, resulting in more sales. Or you made something that enables the user to create infinitely amounts of what your company sell, boss tells you to erase all copies of it. etc.

japanoise 7y ago

Loper-os seems to suffer from the same problems as a lot of "unix hater"/lisp weenie types: while he does point out real flaws in the computing of today, he seriously lacks in a competent, coherent, non-vaporware alternative. His blog is now nothing but bloviating about bitcoin

invalidOrTaken 7y ago
As a not-fully-recovered Lisp weenie, I give a lot more slack to other wild-eyed idealists than I used to. Like, he's not wrong. I also had a HyperCard experience about that age, and it definitely was a significant factor years later. So he doesn't have an alternative. So what? Do you have one for cancer? It's still worth something to avoid Stockholm Syndrome.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JadeNB 7y ago
If you need to use the term "sniveling digital trendoids", then your argument probably isn't as good as you think it is. (The author, not you.)
asciilifeform 7y ago
Author of linked site speaking. Are you sure you are reading the same page? I had half a dozen articles re Bitcoin, the last in 2014...
- japanoise 7y ago
  Your most recent article, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3440 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3440 is tagged bitcoin, and in fact if I click on the tag, I see an awful lot of articles written in the last few months http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=42 http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=42
  - asciilifeform 7y ago
    I do have a multi-chapter series on constant-time integer arithmetic -- indeed tagged incl. "bitcoin", as it is meant to be used in (among other places) a rework of the client. You evidently spent at most 3 seconds reading the link; wouldn't kill you to spend 5 seconds and see what is behind the tag.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657.

crb002 7y ago

How hard would it be to port HyperCard to Qt? No reason we can't have it back.

braythwayt 7y ago
If the LiveCode people can get HyperCard running on *nix, I'm sure HyperCard could be ported to Qt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

slowmovintarget 7y ago

Amid the ranting, the one thought-provoking statement was this: > The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. HyperCard made Macs function as personal computers (the original notion behind the term) and not as digital appliances (video editors, gaming rigs, media boxes... etc.)

eridius 7y ago
All programming environments do that. And Apple continues to this day to give away a free programming environment for your Mac.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  All programming environments do that for programmers. Not all do that for people who aren't software developers. Case in point: Some of the finance people I work with build incredible spreadsheets. Formulas upon formulas that turn their special spreadsheet into what is really an application. They're programming, but that isn't how they think about it (I've asked). They're just Excel power users. HyperCard aficionados were the same way. They were programming with the assumption that they just knew HyperCard really well. You wouldn't be able to sit Douglas Adams (were he alive) in front of XCode and get the equivalent of his HyperCard stack out: https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode The reason is that it requires a dramatically higher investment to create in XCode. "Just learn Swift" doesn't really cut it as an alternative.
  - scroot 7y ago
    It was even clear from the terminology: anyone who made stacks in Hypercard was called an "Author" -- which comprised both "developers" AND users. That naming couldn't be more to the point about the intention of the system.

vincent-toups 7y ago

May as well plug a similar article I wrote like 10 years ago now: https://procyonic.org/blog/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk/ https://procyonic.org/blog/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk/ I actually passed a few emails back and forth with Alan Kay for this. I short version of this piece appeared as a letter to the editor in the New Yorker, too.

carapace 7y ago
> The certificate for procyonic.org expired on Thursday, June 6, 2019. > Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Oops! Thanks for the heads up!

api 7y ago

It's a special case of a more general trend: the complete abandonment of what were once called RAD (rapid application development) tools. Microsoft also killed WYSIWYG Visual Basic (pre-dotnet), quite possibly the most productive GUI builder ever made. Not quite as clean as hypercard, but another example of that bygone era when the user was the customer and not the product. The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, and it seems pretty solidly locked in. Still I do see a push to replace spreadsheets with opaque SaaS tools that do specific things.

slowmovintarget 7y ago
My first real software dev job was with Visual Basic 3.0, then Delphi 1.0. This World Wide Web thing was about to happen, but hadn't quite yet. Compuserve was where the cool kids hung out, and I ran a WildCat BBS with a buddy out of his basement. RAD was rad, for a while.
- mycall 7y ago
  WWW was in effect for many years before 1995, although that was its take off year.
pac39 7y ago
Basically the cloud killed it. As more and more apps started moving to the cloud, there was a lesser need for local app development tools. The GUI development tools of today look like the ruins of a once great programming civilization of 90s.
pjmlp 7y ago
VB.NET is still very productive and outside HN bubble I keep seeing people adopting it when their Excel sheets with VBA macros aren't no longer enough for what they do.
devnulloverflow 7y ago
> The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, Well that and, Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Perl, Awk, Sed, .... I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if command lines hadn't stopped evolving in the '90s.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

When Hypercard was new, you could use it to create user interfaces that looked and felt exactly like all the other Macintosh applications of the era- within a reasonable margin, anyway. Basic expectations are now higher. UIs are more visually complex and subtle. You can't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures. UIs are expected to reflow to devices with different screen sizes and dot pitches. Users expect their programs to give them up-to-the-minute information from the internet, with slick animation and nuanced typography. With flexibility comes inescapable complexity. Could you make a tool as easy to use as Hypercard, and let modern users create useful applications for themselves? Sure, but the results wouldn't be nearly as nice as the applications built with conventional tools that live alongside them. I have a tremendous fondness for Hypercard, but I don't think you could ever make something today which was empowering and full-featured like Hypercard was for its day.

justinator 7y ago
You can't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures. I mean, why not? If I'm a small business, and I need a custom (in-house) app, AND I could do it myself with little training, I'd rather do that then not have the business. (Again) how many businesses run on Excel Spreadsheets? Not every business can hire a programming firm to make a boutique app that's used by 100 people. But I'm also one of those, "Why did FileMaker Pro die?" kinda person. And I still write Perl. I'm a weirdo, but I'm a pragmatic weirdo that likes to get stuff done.
- scroot 7y ago
  I do a lot of freelance and I can't tell you how many businesses I've worked with who had some need that was just a smidge more than their current software would allow. If there was something in between using an interface and learning a full-fledged programming stack from first principles, it would go a long way. Part of this goes towards getting people -- both today's mainstream developers and users -- to think hard about what using a personal computer should mean. I can't think of a better definition of programming than "telling a computer what to do." That should be the first hint.

jdlyga 7y ago

I spent a lot of time as a 7 year old playing around with Hypercard. Gave me a lot of good early exposure to building interfaces.

II2II 7y ago

There were many reasons why Hypercard died: Hypercard was very much a product of it's time. Software was far less complex so it was much easier to create a general purpose development tool for end users. The author argues that attempts to recreate Hypercard try to do too much, that is because users expect more of software today. To give you an idea of what I mean: I used Hypercard to create a cookbook for a family member in the mid-1990's. You could enter recipes, search for recipes, and even export them to HTML. While this would have been an amazing accomplishment a few years earlier, the program was a relic of a bygone era the moment that it was written. Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, may have been possible but would have required extensions to the language. Plenty of extensions existed, which is how companies like Cyan managed to produce an amazing for the time multimedia game (Myst) on what most people viewed as a stack of programmable black and white index cards. Yet extending Hypercard to reflect the technology of the 1990's would have transformed a product for everyone to an incomprehensible mass for anyone aside from developers. And the 1990's were primitive compared to the 2010's, never mind the coming 2020's. In a similar vein, people's interests changed. The mid-1990's brought the web, so people were far more interested in developing for the web. The early days of web development were quite accessible, was focused upon content (much as Hypercard was) and allowed people to embed programs within that content (much as Hypercard did). While Hypercard may have been better for some things and certainly provided a better development environment, it was also obsolete. As much as I loved Hypercard, the reality is that it was neglected rather than buried. It's longevity could have been improved without increasing complexity, such as adding colour or allowing multimedia files to be embedded (without resorting to third-party extensions). On the other hand, it would have died off eventually. The trajectory of web development shows how a once simple and accessible platform can become so complex that it takes a dedicated student to learn.

scroot 7y ago
Another thing to think about is the metaphors used. Stacks, cards, and interactive objects on cards were really good metaphors that fit holistically in the Apple personal computing systems of the late 80s/90s. You're right that a lot of the computing environment has changed (eg the Internet is like a natural resource and should be assumed). Whether it is needfully more complex is another matter. A key question for designers today is this: what are the metaphors that would work for today's computing environments in a similarly holistic way, allowing users to become "authors"? This is something different than a modern Hypercard clone. I think when people want that old "Hypercard feeling," what they really want is this holistic nature, power, and ease of use for regular users -- not simple clones of the old thing.

redleggedfrog 7y ago

His acknowledgement of the elephant in the room ("... shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS...") is prescient for 2011. Today it's even worse. How many versions of lipstick on pig are we to endure (Backbone, Angular, React, Vue..., Bootstrap, less, sass...) before someone actually makes a sane UI development toolkit? Think of the children.

carapace 7y ago
> a sane UI development toolkit? Elm-lang, IMO.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Elm is sane but IMO not ready and may not be for years. Breaking changes each version, plus a lot of boilerplate have moved me off Elm to preferring TS/React even though I love FP
quickthrower2 7y ago
The problem is the web was designed for documents not apps. And JS wasn’t designed for what it does now. The closest thing we had to a sane development toolkit was Adobe Flex. Someone came up with that and it was ok. But other more powerful forces particularly Apple made it disappear. Google is in charge now maybe it’s up to them.
- devnulloverflow 7y ago
  But a lot of the web is in fact serving documents, and using complicated apps to do it. It's not surprising, as the two categories do really merge into one another. A web store is certainly an app -- but it's also the modern equivalent of an store catalogue, which is a document.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Here's what Atkinson said about it in 2002: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have-been/ https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have-been... More clues in this (2016?) Twit interview (including the phrase 'Sculleystink' at about 16m in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdByDjhClU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdByDjhClU

Torwald 7y ago
I am a fan of Leo, but he also tends to fall on my nerves with constantly interrupting people. Atkinson is great in just not letting that happen, FUN!

drngdds 7y ago

"If you disagree with my barely-argued opinion, you're autistic" isn't a great way to close an article

rmrfrmrf 7y ago

From my perspective, HyperCard lives on in 2 distinct branches: webapps and PowerPoint.

mgamache 7y ago

I tried to get a license for SuperCard (it had color), but had to use resedit + HyperCard to add color textures... Miss those days (not so much) off topic (but same era) I loved MacProject... yet another Claris step child software. Moof! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacProject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacProject)

mgamache 7y ago

Hey I just noticed that SuperCard is still alive and offers HyperCard migrations: https://www.supercard.us/ https://www.supercard.us/ (SuperCard was a commercial HyperCard alternative)

nlawalker 7y ago

Hypercard's "letting regular people build useful things" ethos lives on in IFTTT, Zapier and Microsoft Flow. In 2019, it's not super useful to many people to be able to mush together some buttons and textboxes into a desktop UI, but it's fantastically useful to be able to mush together their email, calendar, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify, Alexa, home automation etc.

rtpg 7y ago
The fact that stuff that used to be on local files is now inside these various services makes it _much harder_ to bootstrap together simple programs I think. Though on the other hand if you leverage some other automation tools you can avoid figuring out how to auth to various systems yourself. You just end up contributing to the "everything is connected by duct tape" nature of modern software
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Sorta, kinda, not quite. That's the problem with SaaS - they take your data, silo it up, and expose through highly limited and tightly controlled APIs. Sure, I can make IFTTT save a copy of every picture I upload to Facebook into my Dropbox account (or at least I could, I think it broke). But I can't make it save that picture in original size, because someone didn't expose some option, or an endpoint. Or I can't make IFTTT save all the reactions to my post into a CSV in the format: <<datetime, which post, who, what reaction>>, because such endpoints again aren't exposed or integrated. Etc. I get that IFTTT & folks are doing the best they can, but the companies they're trying to "mush together" made their money on preventing interoperability, so it's still very far from both what could be and what used to be possible.
- alexis_read 7y ago
  You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter. https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/

mgamache 7y ago

Okay this may be unpopular, but I felt like Microsoft VB 3.0 (for me) was a better version of HyperCard on a worse platform.

galaxyLogic 7y ago

I think Web killed Hypercard. Hypercards were kind of components and that was their power. Create onbe card at a time then connect them together. But so were/are web-pages. But you could not connect a hyper-card to another card created by another author executing on another machine. That was the mind-blowing concept of web and it quickly became clear that that is what we wanted to do, not dabble with our own stack of "hyper" cards. For one thing web was not tied to Apple hardware

malicioususer11 7y ago

HyperCard was BS. As an example, the game "Manhole" lacked features, was impossible to understand or interact with, and came with no manual whatsoever that I can recall. Doomed technology that no developer could ever successfuly work with. Good Riddence. >:3

PeterStuer 7y ago

Hypercard was obsoleted by the www. To survive it would have had to become a visual HTML editor. If you are looking inside the Microsoft backcatalog it is not VB that was the Hypercard heir, it was Frontpage for consumer-and Infopath for business applications.

deleted 7y ago

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dusted 7y ago

This autist understand why hypercard was a good idea, and also, the author is an asshole. [edit] So This got flagged.. Because somehow it's entirely acceptable to say "If you don't understand X, you're an autist" ? fuck that. Would it have been just as okay for the author to write "And if you don't get that, you're gay" ?

LeoPanthera 7y ago

archive.org now has the ability to run uploaded Hypercard stacks in your web browser. Example: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_autodiagnostics-25 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_autodiagnostics-25

deleted 7y ago

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tluyben2 7y ago

LiveCode is pretty nice. If you want something fast & crossplatform it is kind of hard to beat. I find the language awful (far too verbose for my taste) but I would say most people here would have that going in 1 to a few days to be productive. The forum is active and people answer fast when stuck.

dantondwa 7y ago

When I was a kid, at the beginning of the 00s, and I was beginning to experiment with computers, I imagined the future of computing to be about reducing the complexity of software development as much as possible. I now realize that I dreamt of something exactly like HyperCards. A world where machines could be programmed using something resembling natural language and where anyone could create and share software. At the time, the closest thing I could find was a Word document where I dragged and dropped buttons to create a pseudo UI and then imagine that it worked. I wish I had access to something like this. I believe that by not having a tool like this, we are taking away from the majority of the population, and in particular the young, the possibility of shaping computers for their own needs. A decision has been taken: the user has to be a passive consumer. It's a mistake and I am really sad about it. It feels, to me, as if there was a decision, intentional or not, of keeping the creation of software as a privilege of a few and not a right of everyone.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> It feels, to me, as if there was a decision, intentional or not, of keeping the creation of software as a privilege of a few and not a right of everyone. It feels that way because that's exactly how it is. If users are creating their own tools and forging their own path it becomes much harder to sell them things and developers aren't in nearly as much demand either. So the groups in the best position to make tools that empower the user are disincentivised to do so. Theoretically, FOSS would take care of this, right? Only, the people making those tools are quite often also professional developers and so have pretty much the same disincentive. They're ok with making other developers' lives easier, but users? Better remove a few more features from Nautilus lest they get the idea they own their own computer.
- scroot 7y ago
  It takes a lot of brains, time, money, failure, and just plain screwing around to come up with something like Hypercard or even the earliest personal computing systems. FOSS doesn't allow the time and money part, which is why they are stuck in making "open" tools for advanced teletype emulation. It is not a coincidence that Atkinson made this as an Apple fellow, where he had resources to work on whatever he wanted and could make whatever demands he wanted (and likewise not surprising that Apple could never make HC "profitable")

ptx 7y ago

Where is the eval call in the hypertalk script? Is it "value of" applied to a string, i.e. "value of value of card field"? (I assume it's not simply "value of" since that doesn't seem like it would work for the operator buttons in the example - or does "/" or "+" evaluate to itself?) This seems like a good reason to kill the language at least, in the Internet-connected era. In a language that's supposed to read like English, eval should be "dangerously execute untrustworthy text from ... as program instructions" or something, not a polymorphic call to a common operator accidentally applied to the wrong type.

jakobegger 7y ago

Hypercard was a very general purpose app, but it was a bit of a "jack of all trades, master of none". I loved Hypercard, but it was never really an actual good solution for any of the things you may want to do with it. 1) Lots of people tried to use it for making games, but anyone who tried quickly ran into its limitations. There were a handful of neat Hypercard games, but when I tried to see how they were made, I saw that they made heavy use of XCMDs and XFCNs -- custom extensions you had to write in a compiled language (Pascal? C?). At that point, why would you bother with Hypercard at all? 2) Another common use case were simple databases, like an address book, or a stack for all your music cassettes, or something like that. But it lacked search tools and a way to work with bulk data, so it wasn't really a good solution for databases. Filemaker was much better for databases. 3) Or you could use it for simple specialized calculators, like a currency converter. But it was a lot of work to set it all up correctly, and Excel was actually a lot more useful for these kinds of tasks.

scroot 7y ago
> I saw that they made heavy use of XCMDs and XFCNs -- custom extensions you had to write in a compiled language (Pascal? C?). At that point, why would you bother with Hypercard at all? Hey, don't forget about shareware culture! You didn't need to code up these XFCN/XCMDs yourself. You could try and buy them! There was a whole ecosystem of developers making these things (WindowMaker anyone?) and it worked pretty well for what it was.

lioeters 7y ago

Another article that pops up regularly on HN, on this relevant topic: The coming war on general-purpose computing (previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364) There are a number of admirable attempts to create the "next Hypercard" on the web. I haven't encountered one that really sticks, but as an old(er) timer who remembers the earlier era of personal computers - where the user was really the user, not "used" - I see that it's an important dream to keep alive, especially in our current cultural context of an increasingly exploitative web.

genuineDSD 7y ago

Uhm, I have grown up with Macintoshs and I still use them. So, my comment has at least double the emotional intensity compared to the author's. ;-) In all seriousness, I say this because it is clear that his post is mostly based on an emotional attachment to a tool, not on critical thinking. Maybe I misunderstood, but if I understood him correctly, the premise is that Hypercard would still be around if it did not collide with Steve's vision of a world of dumb users and smart engineers. This is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. Are you willing to learn? First, Hypercard was created when 13" 256-color displays were state of the art (actually even earlier) and there were exactly two devices to interact with your Macintosh: a keyboard and a mouse. So, for simple tasks, it was quite easy to create a tool that would allow you to stick together a simple program using clicks and a verbose scripting language. Nowadays, however, general purpose applications are supposed to work on a variety of devices, from 4" phones with touchscreens to desktop-Macs supporting 27"+ screens being used with traditional keyboards and mice. Maybe this will change in the future, but if you want to precisely describe a structure (GUI-compontents) in a generalized fashion, a textual representation (e.g. react-components), so far, is just superior to any GUI-tool that is around. When hypercard was created, VCS (such as git, svn, etc.) weren't really a thing. Most software was developed in about the same way as you created Hypercard projects: You made changes to your main copy and that's that. Today, you don't even think about starting a software project without having vcs in place. Similarly, when Hypercard was created, many software methodologies weren't a thing: Unit Testing, Integration testing, etc. Now, I am a software engineer, and while I never wrote Hypercard applications myself, I once found myself maintaining an Filemaker-Application. Filemaker, I reckon, is very similar to Hypercard in that you plug together your app using a GUI and some overly verbose, pseudo-simple scripting language. And, needless to say, this was an absolute disaster: In the beginning, it was a simple tool that automated a couple of tasks and it was created in a very short period of time, thanks to the easy-of-use of Filemaker. However, as with all other tools, it grew in complexity. Now, ever tried to track changes in the source code using Filemaker-files? Ever tried to unit test Filemaker-code? And don't get me started with the absolute ludicrous idea to use programming languages that resemble a natural language. Claiming that this is as effective as using an abstract language is akin to describing complex mathematical facts using only a natural language—while possible, it is completely unfeasible.

soapdog 7y ago

Hey, I took some time to write a reply to that post showing a modern day alternative: https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hypercard.html https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp... I posted another comment linking to a modern day HyperCard that was downvoted without any explanation? I don't understand why it happened. Can someone tell me?

gdubs 7y ago

Owning a Mac was a very self-selective thing back in the day, and at the time the “bicycle for the mind” ethos was a deep part of Apple’s marketing. HyperCard fit that perfectly. So, if you had the money and inclination to buy a Mac, you were also buying into a philosophy and a promise. That meant that regular people, not professional developers, were engaged and interested in making the most of their (expensive) machines. HyperCard was simple to use, and the return on investment in learning how to build with it was immediately clear. Imagine you’re a botanist with the spare money to buy a Mac. You could spend a few hours with HyperCard and put together a beautiful plant database, full of pictures and hyperlinks. I love those kinds of stories from the HyperCard era, and it’s a vision of the power of computing that still resonates today, and is a big reason why stories on HyperCard are perennially popular. In today’s smartphone era we have millions of pre-made apps ready to consume and use. It’s amazing in many ways, but if you think Xcode, or JavaScript and HTML are the natural successors to HyperCard than you don’t really understand what was so magical about HyperCard.

asciilifeform 7y ago

Author of linked piece speaking. Seems like many readers continue to miss the essential point, just as they did in 2011: Hypercard wasn't a gem of graphic design (1-bit colour, plain line graphics) or of programming language design (one of the many laughable attempts at "natural language programming") or of high-performance number crunching... but it was simple. I.e., the entire system was fully covered by ~100 pages of printed manual. It fit in one's head. (And did not take 20 years to fit-in-head, either, an intelligent child could become "master of all he surveys" in a week or two.) Where is the printed manual for the current MS VB, or the WWW's HTML/JS/CSS/etc stack (yes including all browser warts), or for any of the other proposed "replacements" ? How many trees would have to be killed to print such a manual, and would it fit in your house? Could you read it cover to cover, or would die of old age first?

314 7y ago
Do I recognize your name and writing style from Kuro5hin?
- asciilifeform 7y ago
  Doubt it: I have not written at Kuro5hin. (Possibly linked there at some point, however?)

dnicolson 7y ago

I wonder why there was a "Scripting language" dropdown menu, was anything but HyperTalk ever possible?