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I don't want to drone on about this too much longer since we obviously disagree about some of the big points here (and agree about the "direction," which is mor

by scroot 5y ago

I don't want to drone on about this too much longer since we obviously disagree about some of the big points here (and agree about the "direction," which is more important anyway), but: > I don’t see how there was anything holistic about HyperCard. It wasn’t really much different from Visual Basic except for the Card and Link metaphor, which was good for creating scaffolding without having to start coding first. Database builders like FileMaker or multimedia tools like Macromedia director, and Flash, are in the same family of tool. Even PowerPoint. There was certainly nothing specially integrated about it. It was just a tool. If you look at, say System 7 and the versions of Hypercard that ran on it you'll see that this isn't true. One could control important "outer" functions of the whole operating system from within Hypercard using its own conception of the world, which I would say counts as special integration. The UI even looked quite similar to the rest of the system, making it "real". There was a kind of seamlessness there, and it came before things like PowerPoint etc. Also it was more than just presentations. Non-"programmer" Mac users were building all sorts of things, from zines to point-of-sale systems for their local businesses. At one point in the early 1990s Apple estimated that there were 4 million authors creating their own stacks. I definitely agree that today -- with the current systems we have and the environment that the companies who make them operate -- the problem is extra hard. My recurring thought on the matter is that we need to toss aside things like backward compatibility and software portability (ie, recreate a computing system from the ground up) in order to have what we are talking about. At the end of the day we are still in the world of C and Unix and I don't think we're going to find what we are looking for so long as that remains the case.

zepto 5y ago
> One could control important "outer" functions of the whole operating system from within Hypercard using its own conception of the world, which I would say counts as special integration. Ok - this sounds interesting, but what does it do that can’t be done by VB? > The UI even looked quite similar to the rest of the system, making it "real". This is an important quality, but absolutely one shared by VB and database builders. > There was a kind of seamlessness there, and it came before things like PowerPoint etc. Yes, that it was early and beloved is not in dispute. My point is that it’s not special beyond that, and nothing has been lost. > Also it was more than just presentations. Ok, but that straw-man’s the other tools I mentioned. I mentioned a bunch of things that go far beyond HyperCard in their programmability. > Non-"programmer" Mac users were building all sorts of things, from zines to point-of-sale systems for their local businesses. Zines are augmented presentations. Point of sale systems require programming, and are the canonical example of what database builders are used for today. > At one point in the early 1990s Apple estimated that there were 4 million authors creating their own stacks. Ok, but what point are you making with that. Probably hundreds of millions of people have created a PowerPoint, but how many of them have programmed a behavior using the embedded basic? It’s quite obvious that only a tiny fraction of those 4 million people did anything more than simple presentations. > I definitely agree that today -- with the current systems we have and the environment that the companies who make them operate -- the problem is extra hard. My recurring thought on the matter is that we need to toss aside things like backward compatibility and software portability (ie, recreate a computing system from the ground up) in order to have what we are talking about. I’m not sure about that because I can’t see what advantage that has over just building a VM that can leverage existing platform work, but I am open to being convinced. However, what is not clear, and which nobody articulates, is how such a tabula-rasa would be different and not just dead end again. > At the end of the day we are still in the world of C and Unix and I don't think we're going to find what we are looking for so long as that remains the case. This isn’t clear to me. Given that the entire platform HyperCard ran on can be trivially emulated in a browser in JavaScript, C and Unix aren’t standing in the way of building something better. Nobody being able to say what it would even look like is the real problem.

by scroot 5y ago

zepto 5y ago

> One could control important "outer" functions of the whole operating system from within Hypercard using its own conception of the world, which I would say counts as special integration. Ok - this sounds interesting, but what does it do that can’t be done by VB? > The UI even looked quite similar to the rest of the system, making it "real". This is an important quality, but absolutely one shared by VB and database builders. > There was a kind of seamlessness there, and it came before things like PowerPoint etc. Yes, that it was early and beloved is not in dispute. My point is that it’s not special beyond that, and nothing has been lost. > Also it was more than just presentations. Ok, but that straw-man’s the other tools I mentioned. I mentioned a bunch of things that go far beyond HyperCard in their programmability. > Non-"programmer" Mac users were building all sorts of things, from zines to point-of-sale systems for their local businesses. Zines are augmented presentations. Point of sale systems require programming, and are the canonical example of what database builders are used for today. > At one point in the early 1990s Apple estimated that there were 4 million authors creating their own stacks. Ok, but what point are you making with that. Probably hundreds of millions of people have created a PowerPoint, but how many of them have programmed a behavior using the embedded basic? It’s quite obvious that only a tiny fraction of those 4 million people did anything more than simple presentations. > I definitely agree that today -- with the current systems we have and the environment that the companies who make them operate -- the problem is extra hard. My recurring thought on the matter is that we need to toss aside things like backward compatibility and software portability (ie, recreate a computing system from the ground up) in order to have what we are talking about. I’m not sure about that because I can’t see what advantage that has over just building a VM that can leverage existing platform work, but I am open to being convinced. However, what is not clear, and which nobody articulates, is how such a tabula-rasa would be different and not just dead end again. > At the end of the day we are still in the world of C and Unix and I don't think we're going to find what we are looking for so long as that remains the case. This isn’t clear to me. Given that the entire platform HyperCard ran on can be trivially emulated in a browser in JavaScript, C and Unix aren’t standing in the way of building something better. Nobody being able to say what it would even look like is the real problem.