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Swift is absolutely targeted as an introductory programming language. The same audience that was scripting in Hypercard could grab Apple's Swift Playgrounds iPa

Swift is absolutely targeted as an introductory programming language. The same audience that was scripting in Hypercard could grab Apple's Swift Playgrounds iPad app and start learning Swift using neat interactive tutorials today and graduate to writing full-fledged programs. Not only that, but Xcode Playgrounds on the desktop are also a great interactive environment for playing with code, just without the awesome interactive tutorials that Swift Playgrounds on the iPad has.

CharlesW 7y ago
> The same audience that was scripting in Hypercard could grab Apple's Swift Playgrounds iPad app and start learning Swift using neat interactive tutorials today and graduate to writing full-fledged programs. You're correct in that some software developers got their first taste of programming with HyperCard, but you're incorrect in that 99%+ of HyperCard users would have zero interest in developing in Xcode (regardless of language). They are completely different experiences designed for completely different types of users.
- eridius 7y ago
  I said Swift Playgrounds, not Xcode. But I also disagree. The people who just dragged around icons in Hypercard and never actually did any scripting, they wouldn't do anything with Xcode, but they're also not the people we're talking about. The people who did learn Hypercard scripting absolutely could do the exact same thing by dragging around buttons in Xcode's Interface Builder and hooking them up with a little bit of Swift scripting. That tutorial about making a calculator in Hypercard, you could do very nearly the same thing in Xcode except for the missing "eval" operator, but that's ok because you can just run each operator immediately (like normal calculators do) instead of building up a long string and then eval'ing the whole thing.
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    > I said Swift Playgrounds, not Xcode. You did, but (as you note) Swift Playgrounds don't get you anywhere near the interactive, self-contained experience that users could create and share with HyperCard. > The people who did learn Hypercard scripting absolutely could do the exact same thing by dragging around buttons in Xcode's Interface Builder and hooking them up with a little bit of Swift scripting. What you're saying is analogous to saying, "People who learned Excel and VBA could do the exact same thing by creating a web app in Visual Studio Code and hooking it up with a little bit of JavaScript". Yes, conceptually both are "just" programming. In reality, they're worlds apart.
    - hhas01 7y ago
      “Swift Playgrounds don't get you anywhere near the interactive, self-contained experience that users could create and share with HyperCard.” This. I remember trying Playgrounds when it came out, and it took only minutes to reveal itself as an embarrassing fraud. It pretends to be a persistent environment in the style of Smalltalk systems but it isn’t. Edit a single line of code, and re-executes all of them. Every single time. Utterly useless for exploring stateful systems. Utterly useless as an open environment that users can shape and grow to suit themselves.† Worse than useless, actually, because it lies to those users just as Tim Cook does. Hypercard may have had its problems, not least its dour unappealling 1-bit graphic shell, but it was built up from, around, and for users; a depth of design that both reveals and proves itself in use. Software that fits itself to its users; not the other way about. Swift Playgrounds may bring all the shiny, but scratch its surface, step beyond the picturesque preplanned boundaries, and it reveals itself a hollow shell. Canned hype-ware; a dumb monkey-trainer, nothing more. Seymour Papert would’ve garroted it, were he not spinning in his grave instead. -- †Bonus irony: Swift’s command-line REPL implemented persistency absolutely fine, so there was absolutely no excuse for Playgrounds’ botched cheat. (OTOH, the REPL completely buggers up the “P” bit, making it equally dreadful for non-trivial interactive coding.)
hhas01 7y ago
There is nothing “introductory” about Swift. It’s a C++ descendant with all the complexity and inconsistency to prove it. All the Playgrounds lipstick in the world doesn’t change the fact it’s a pig, and Tim Cook on stage telling edu customers that Apple created Swift to teach kids to code is just a reminder that Cook is an absolute hack at sales. .. As for Hypercard, it died because nobody knew how to sell it. No customers, no revenue; no product. Doesn’t matter if you’ve the best technology in the world, it ain’t worth squat if it doesn’t put bums on seats. And while users who did “get” HC really got it, and absolutely adored it as a result, there wasn’t anywhere enough of them to justify its continued existence as part of the Apple product line. A basic rule of business: learn how to fire your customers. Scrapping niche-appeal distractions that will never drive your major markets is just a subset of that. https://hbr.org/2011/08/its-time-to-fire-some-of-your.htm https://hbr.org/2011/08/its-time-to-fire-some-of-your.htm

CharlesW 7y ago

> The same audience that was scripting in Hypercard could grab Apple's Swift Playgrounds iPad app and start learning Swift using neat interactive tutorials today and graduate to writing full-fledged programs. You're correct in that some software developers got their first taste of programming with HyperCard, but you're incorrect in that 99%+ of HyperCard users would have zero interest in developing in Xcode (regardless of language). They are completely different experiences designed for completely different types of users.

eridius 7y ago
I said Swift Playgrounds, not Xcode. But I also disagree. The people who just dragged around icons in Hypercard and never actually did any scripting, they wouldn't do anything with Xcode, but they're also not the people we're talking about. The people who did learn Hypercard scripting absolutely could do the exact same thing by dragging around buttons in Xcode's Interface Builder and hooking them up with a little bit of Swift scripting. That tutorial about making a calculator in Hypercard, you could do very nearly the same thing in Xcode except for the missing "eval" operator, but that's ok because you can just run each operator immediately (like normal calculators do) instead of building up a long string and then eval'ing the whole thing.
- CharlesW 7y ago
  > I said Swift Playgrounds, not Xcode. You did, but (as you note) Swift Playgrounds don't get you anywhere near the interactive, self-contained experience that users could create and share with HyperCard. > The people who did learn Hypercard scripting absolutely could do the exact same thing by dragging around buttons in Xcode's Interface Builder and hooking them up with a little bit of Swift scripting. What you're saying is analogous to saying, "People who learned Excel and VBA could do the exact same thing by creating a web app in Visual Studio Code and hooking it up with a little bit of JavaScript". Yes, conceptually both are "just" programming. In reality, they're worlds apart.
  - hhas01 7y ago
    “Swift Playgrounds don't get you anywhere near the interactive, self-contained experience that users could create and share with HyperCard.” This. I remember trying Playgrounds when it came out, and it took only minutes to reveal itself as an embarrassing fraud. It pretends to be a persistent environment in the style of Smalltalk systems but it isn’t. Edit a single line of code, and re-executes all of them. Every single time. Utterly useless for exploring stateful systems. Utterly useless as an open environment that users can shape and grow to suit themselves.† Worse than useless, actually, because it lies to those users just as Tim Cook does. Hypercard may have had its problems, not least its dour unappealling 1-bit graphic shell, but it was built up from, around, and for users; a depth of design that both reveals and proves itself in use. Software that fits itself to its users; not the other way about. Swift Playgrounds may bring all the shiny, but scratch its surface, step beyond the picturesque preplanned boundaries, and it reveals itself a hollow shell. Canned hype-ware; a dumb monkey-trainer, nothing more. Seymour Papert would’ve garroted it, were he not spinning in his grave instead. -- †Bonus irony: Swift’s command-line REPL implemented persistency absolutely fine, so there was absolutely no excuse for Playgrounds’ botched cheat. (OTOH, the REPL completely buggers up the “P” bit, making it equally dreadful for non-trivial interactive coding.)

hhas01 7y ago

There is nothing “introductory” about Swift. It’s a C++ descendant with all the complexity and inconsistency to prove it. All the Playgrounds lipstick in the world doesn’t change the fact it’s a pig, and Tim Cook on stage telling edu customers that Apple created Swift to teach kids to code is just a reminder that Cook is an absolute hack at sales. .. As for Hypercard, it died because nobody knew how to sell it. No customers, no revenue; no product. Doesn’t matter if you’ve the best technology in the world, it ain’t worth squat if it doesn’t put bums on seats. And while users who did “get” HC really got it, and absolutely adored it as a result, there wasn’t anywhere enough of them to justify its continued existence as part of the Apple product line. A basic rule of business: learn how to fire your customers. Scrapping niche-appeal distractions that will never drive your major markets is just a subset of that. https://hbr.org/2011/08/its-time-to-fire-some-of-your.htm https://hbr.org/2011/08/its-time-to-fire-some-of-your.htm