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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 woul

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.)

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.)