8 ms·

Douglas Adams on Hypercard and new educational models

159 points by arbesman 4y ago

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
If you love Douglas Adams, like I do, watch "Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe and Everything" [0], if you haven't done so. Heck, even if you did years ago. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc
readthenotes1 4y ago
Great fun: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_Beyond_the_Mackerel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_B...
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Oh boy. I had that on the IIfx I used in college.
- hnbear 4y ago
  And interestingly, given that's a Cyan game, their more famous title, Myst, was also just HyperCard stacks behind the scenes, with each world being it's own deck.
  - clusmore 4y ago
    If you want to hear more about this from the man himself, Rand Miller has a great video with Ars Technica: https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4 https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4 And extended edition: https://youtu.be/5qxg0ykOcgM https://youtu.be/5qxg0ykOcgM
detrites 4y ago
Strange article. It's an interesting and well-written piece relating what DNA wrote about Hypercard (and what Hypercard is), before suddenly switching to "educational models" without explanation, and then abruptly ending.
- wodow 4y ago
  I believe the main article ends at the "Share" button, then there's a separate ad or section about the educational models.
  - detrites 4y ago
    Haven't seen that format before. Substack ordinarily scatters various buttons/images/signups etc through an article so I'm accustomed to skipping over them to get to the next paragraph. The subtitle of the article specifically mentions Educational Models, creating an expectation they will be covered as part of the subject matter. But then it's tacked on without any context or reason. Total non-sequitur.
rcarmo 4y ago
I miss Douglas. I wonder what he would write about today's Internet.
- nix23 4y ago
  The Bird-ride of Rocketman a discworld novel
GlenTheMachine 4y ago
It seems to me that something like this is really what the iPad is missing. Instead of each application being in its own sandbox, imagine if they were all scriptable, and the scripting language was as accessible as HyperCard was. That would really be something.
- soapdog 4y ago
  AppleScript was just like that.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Does anyone know if there is a software that can open other software, manipulate that software, and then take the results of that manipulation and do other things with it? I'm envisioning something like being able to tell the managing software to take your most recent photo, apply a filter to it, resize it with Waifu2x and then post it to your instagram or something similar. Or to tell it to open Krita, make a line drawing of a character based on a photo, then use that as the input for stable diffusion 16 times and show me the results in a new folder. I'm guessing the rudiments of such a system exist but that the control and orchestration element is missing.
    - kalleboo 4y ago
      On Apple platforms there is AppleScript, Automator and Shortcuts that can all do that, if the apps support it.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    I’ve been using Shortcuts pretty extensively. There are challenges of course. But for the most part, it’s great. Most good apps expose their actions. The usual culprits like Outlook lock it down based on corporate policy. You can even make bespoke API calls. Siri is much more usable for me because of this. There are major glaring issues - like the rigidness of the Timer and the lack of a separate “sleep” timer. No option to pause the shortcut for an extended period of time. And the all too familiar Apple bugs these days. In spite of all this it’s definitely one of the exciting things Apple has released - especially after they made it portable between the phone, watch, iPad, mac and HomePod - albeit limited.
zoenolan 4y ago
He also presented the documentary Hyperland for the BBC https://youtu.be/1iAJPoc23-M https://youtu.be/1iAJPoc23-M
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Looking for someone to post this. The outro after 46:30 is reminiscent of mondo 2000 and verbum magazine.
michaericalribo 4y ago
Apparently his Mac was like an extension to Adams’ brain, and all of his work was stored on it. It might make it more brittle to changing technology, but on the other hand it was hugely productive for him.
dylan604 4y ago
The fact that Adams was the first European Mac owner and that Stephen Fry was the second warms my heart. If that was the only thing I remember from this article (very high probability), my day was still better from reading it.
airstrike 4y ago
> But Adams makes a powerful point: the general-purpose nature—as well as composability—of a piece of software is just as important as its low floors and its approachability. This is an interesting take. From this perspective, I suppose Unix got composability right but its approachability to the average person is nearly zero. In some way "pure" functional programming often feels the same way to me. Extremely composable but am I willing to trade approachability for that? And on second thought maybe that's true of "pure OO" languages too... Maybe people feel the same way about hardcore text editors like vim or emacs? The list goes on... I think I read somewhere that innovation is defined as the solution to a trade-off, and this particular battle between approachability and composability seems like a particularly fruitful avenue to explore if looking for "modern problems to solve"
- fathyb 4y ago
  Wondering what more approachable looks like in this case? A GUI embracing Unix metaphors?
  - clem 4y ago
    "It's a UNIX system! I know this! It shows you what to do!"
  - mcguire 4y ago
    You're giving me SMIT flashbacks here. :-)
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I wonder if flowcharts could work? Blender’s nodes seems nice, although I guess Blender users are typically fairly technically inclined. Or spreadsheets. Spreadsheets where the cells run little Python programs. Someone has done this I think, forget the name of the program…
- bobajeff 4y ago
  I'd guess the Node.js and npm got composability w/ approachability formula the most correct. Rust comes close but using rust libraries is where approachability falls apart fast. As for editors. Right now vscode get that formula the most correct. As for Unix what do we have to compare it too? Everything more or less is a Unix these days. So it couldn't have got approachability that wrong.
atebyagrue 4y ago
Never played with the format back in the day, but while researching it a while back, I found that archive.org hosts some of the older ones & you can play with them online: https://archive.org/details/BeyondCyberpunkMacintosh https://archive.org/details/BeyondCyberpunkMacintosh
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
DA was an official, certified Apple developer. They even had him keynote an early WWDC (as well as Harry Anderson). I always liked his take on Windows 95: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/os_hype.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/os_hype.html
- iNerdier 4y ago
  Reading this just makes me wonder if he ever (and surely he must have) used an Amiga. Why so bullish on the Macintosh with all its specific weirdness when, even as good as Apple was at the start did he not see the other more interesting forks in the ‘80s as worth it?
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    Better hardware, yes. Better software/UI/toolkits/libraries, absolutely not <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820076>.
mcguire 4y ago
"It was an incredibly open-ended piece of software, allowing those without much expertise in programming (or even any at all) to build a wide variety of computational tools. To borrow a formulation from Seymour Papert (who co-created the programming language Logo), HyperCard had low floors and high ceilings." Speaking as someone who used HyperCard to create a couple of applications, this is...somewhat overstated. It was quite good at creating things that resembled flipping through a deck of cards. (One app was a "smart test" that would present a more-or-less difficult question based on the user's previous answers---my first introduction to Bayesian statistics.) It was, however, not a good programming environment if you needed to do anything complex---think of writing a complicated Emacs major mode, not using Emacs lisp but a simplified textual language intended for those without much expertise. This is a general problem for systems built for "those without much expertise in programming (or even any at all)"; they may be able to do simple things, but you'll still need to be a "real programmer" to do slightly more complicated things, and a "real programmer" will be doing it with one hand tied behind their back.
- madrox 4y ago
  As someone who also used Hypercard, I tend to agree. There's a reason we aren't still talking about Hypercard today the way it was talked about then, but it was a different time. We were so much more enamored with software's potential. Today, we get upset if a button press takes five seconds instead of one.
- disparate_dan 4y ago
  While I never used HyperCard, the ‘low floors and high ceilings’ makes me think of spreadsheets. Given that I code all day professionally, I have quite a high bar for using code to solve personal needs, but I love to use spreadsheets - there’s just enough automation to make powerful, useful mini-applications, quickly, without much complexity, and the presentation capabilities are very strong. While there is brittleness - I can share a budget sheet with my wife and it will be broken in minutes - it’s easy to fix and evolve, but most importantly, they are accessible and grokable for someone without much technical knowledge. I guess spreadsheet apps are pretty self-contained so I’m not sure that composability is a strength.
- 4y ago
donatj 4y ago
The seeming death of software that empowers users never ceases to make me sad. We have this machine of near limitless power and endless possibilities, and yet we do everything in our power to make doing things yourself esoteric. You have to pay someone to develop simple things you should absolutely be able to do yourself. When I was a pre-teen my computer booted up to BASIC. I taught largely by guessing commands. I created many simple graphical games drawing lines and circles. SCREEN 12 LINE 0 0 640 480 5 Imagine being a pre-teen today and just trying to draw a line to the screen. Several hundred lines of boilerplate. We've lost more than we've gained.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  <!DOCTYPE html><hr />
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Lose the unnecessary self-close and you're really efficient.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Still holding out hope that sanity will return to the web and we'll bring back xhtml, I guess.
- elcaro 4y ago
  The closest thing these days is probably p5js (Processing in JS). function setup() { createCanvas(640, 480) } function draw() { background(0, 100, 200) strokeWeight(100) stroke(200, 200, 0) line(0, 0, 640, 480) } There's an online editor so pre-teens (or indeed post-teens) can get started right away (https://editor.p5js.org https://editor.p5js.org) but I'll admit there's still quite a hurdle if you want to host yourself, or run offline.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago
johnohara 4y ago
Leave it to Douglas Adams to talk about Hypercard and leave you thinking differently about giraffes.
talkingtab 4y ago
I keep trying to understand why Hypercard was good. Although I agree with the points in the article, I guess/think/suspect that there was more to it than that. One of the things that struck me when I fired up Hypercard.sheepvm was that what came out of Hypercard is very different than what comes out of html/css/javascript. The same way that if you paint with a palette knife versus a paint brush, what comes out is different. As a thought experiment, since I am currently building a website, I started using Hypercard to mock up the web UI. It is immediately different. (Yes I know there is the black&white vs colors). Does anyone have any thoughts on that or why that would be?
- bigiain 4y ago
  > I keep trying to understand why Hypercard was good. I reckon it’s like the GUI version of BASIC. It was, as other comments point out, kinda toy-like, but in a good way as well as a bad way. It gave Mac users a way to “play” with their Mac and make it do their bidding in much the same way that BASIC interpreters built into pre-GUI home computers did. It was half way between magic and godlike power - at least for some people. It gave a very low barrier to entry feeling of “Oh, I get it now. I can make this machine do what I want it to do. I am in control now!” In my head, Director or Flash was the next equivalent tool in that niche.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
If you want something like hypercard this looks cool: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker There's a link to a browser version there too

159 points by arbesman 4y ago

If you love Douglas Adams, like I do, watch "Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe and Everything" [0], if you haven't done so. Heck, even if you did years ago. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

readthenotes1 4y ago

Great fun: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_Beyond_the_Mackerel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_B...

rcarmo 4y ago
Oh boy. I had that on the IIfx I used in college.
hnbear 4y ago
And interestingly, given that's a Cyan game, their more famous title, Myst, was also just HyperCard stacks behind the scenes, with each world being it's own deck.
- clusmore 4y ago
  If you want to hear more about this from the man himself, Rand Miller has a great video with Ars Technica: https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4 https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4 And extended edition: https://youtu.be/5qxg0ykOcgM https://youtu.be/5qxg0ykOcgM

detrites 4y ago

Strange article. It's an interesting and well-written piece relating what DNA wrote about Hypercard (and what Hypercard is), before suddenly switching to "educational models" without explanation, and then abruptly ending.

wodow 4y ago
I believe the main article ends at the "Share" button, then there's a separate ad or section about the educational models.
- detrites 4y ago
  Haven't seen that format before. Substack ordinarily scatters various buttons/images/signups etc through an article so I'm accustomed to skipping over them to get to the next paragraph. The subtitle of the article specifically mentions Educational Models, creating an expectation they will be covered as part of the subject matter. But then it's tacked on without any context or reason. Total non-sequitur.

rcarmo 4y ago

I miss Douglas. I wonder what he would write about today's Internet.

nix23 4y ago
The Bird-ride of Rocketman a discworld novel

GlenTheMachine 4y ago

It seems to me that something like this is really what the iPad is missing. Instead of each application being in its own sandbox, imagine if they were all scriptable, and the scripting language was as accessible as HyperCard was. That would really be something.

soapdog 4y ago
AppleScript was just like that.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  Does anyone know if there is a software that can open other software, manipulate that software, and then take the results of that manipulation and do other things with it? I'm envisioning something like being able to tell the managing software to take your most recent photo, apply a filter to it, resize it with Waifu2x and then post it to your instagram or something similar. Or to tell it to open Krita, make a line drawing of a character based on a photo, then use that as the input for stable diffusion 16 times and show me the results in a new folder. I'm guessing the rudiments of such a system exist but that the control and orchestration element is missing.
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    On Apple platforms there is AppleScript, Automator and Shortcuts that can all do that, if the apps support it.
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  I’ve been using Shortcuts pretty extensively. There are challenges of course. But for the most part, it’s great. Most good apps expose their actions. The usual culprits like Outlook lock it down based on corporate policy. You can even make bespoke API calls. Siri is much more usable for me because of this. There are major glaring issues - like the rigidness of the Timer and the lack of a separate “sleep” timer. No option to pause the shortcut for an extended period of time. And the all too familiar Apple bugs these days. In spite of all this it’s definitely one of the exciting things Apple has released - especially after they made it portable between the phone, watch, iPad, mac and HomePod - albeit limited.

zoenolan 4y ago

He also presented the documentary Hyperland for the BBC https://youtu.be/1iAJPoc23-M https://youtu.be/1iAJPoc23-M

kristopolous 4y ago
Looking for someone to post this. The outro after 46:30 is reminiscent of mondo 2000 and verbum magazine.

michaericalribo 4y ago

Apparently his Mac was like an extension to Adams’ brain, and all of his work was stored on it. It might make it more brittle to changing technology, but on the other hand it was hugely productive for him.

dylan604 4y ago

The fact that Adams was the first European Mac owner and that Stephen Fry was the second warms my heart. If that was the only thing I remember from this article (very high probability), my day was still better from reading it.

airstrike 4y ago

> But Adams makes a powerful point: the general-purpose nature—as well as composability—of a piece of software is just as important as its low floors and its approachability. This is an interesting take. From this perspective, I suppose Unix got composability right but its approachability to the average person is nearly zero. In some way "pure" functional programming often feels the same way to me. Extremely composable but am I willing to trade approachability for that? And on second thought maybe that's true of "pure OO" languages too... Maybe people feel the same way about hardcore text editors like vim or emacs? The list goes on... I think I read somewhere that innovation is defined as the solution to a trade-off, and this particular battle between approachability and composability seems like a particularly fruitful avenue to explore if looking for "modern problems to solve"

fathyb 4y ago
Wondering what more approachable looks like in this case? A GUI embracing Unix metaphors?
- clem 4y ago
  "It's a UNIX system! I know this! It shows you what to do!"
- mcguire 4y ago
  You're giving me SMIT flashbacks here. :-)
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I wonder if flowcharts could work? Blender’s nodes seems nice, although I guess Blender users are typically fairly technically inclined. Or spreadsheets. Spreadsheets where the cells run little Python programs. Someone has done this I think, forget the name of the program…
bobajeff 4y ago
I'd guess the Node.js and npm got composability w/ approachability formula the most correct. Rust comes close but using rust libraries is where approachability falls apart fast. As for editors. Right now vscode get that formula the most correct. As for Unix what do we have to compare it too? Everything more or less is a Unix these days. So it couldn't have got approachability that wrong.

atebyagrue 4y ago

Never played with the format back in the day, but while researching it a while back, I found that archive.org hosts some of the older ones & you can play with them online: https://archive.org/details/BeyondCyberpunkMacintosh https://archive.org/details/BeyondCyberpunkMacintosh

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

DA was an official, certified Apple developer. They even had him keynote an early WWDC (as well as Harry Anderson). I always liked his take on Windows 95: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/os_hype.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/os_hype.html

iNerdier 4y ago
Reading this just makes me wonder if he ever (and surely he must have) used an Amiga. Why so bullish on the Macintosh with all its specific weirdness when, even as good as Apple was at the start did he not see the other more interesting forks in the ‘80s as worth it?
- TMWNN 4y ago
  Better hardware, yes. Better software/UI/toolkits/libraries, absolutely not <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820076>.

mcguire 4y ago

"It was an incredibly open-ended piece of software, allowing those without much expertise in programming (or even any at all) to build a wide variety of computational tools. To borrow a formulation from Seymour Papert (who co-created the programming language Logo), HyperCard had low floors and high ceilings." Speaking as someone who used HyperCard to create a couple of applications, this is...somewhat overstated. It was quite good at creating things that resembled flipping through a deck of cards. (One app was a "smart test" that would present a more-or-less difficult question based on the user's previous answers---my first introduction to Bayesian statistics.) It was, however, not a good programming environment if you needed to do anything complex---think of writing a complicated Emacs major mode, not using Emacs lisp but a simplified textual language intended for those without much expertise. This is a general problem for systems built for "those without much expertise in programming (or even any at all)"; they may be able to do simple things, but you'll still need to be a "real programmer" to do slightly more complicated things, and a "real programmer" will be doing it with one hand tied behind their back.

madrox 4y ago
As someone who also used Hypercard, I tend to agree. There's a reason we aren't still talking about Hypercard today the way it was talked about then, but it was a different time. We were so much more enamored with software's potential. Today, we get upset if a button press takes five seconds instead of one.
disparate_dan 4y ago
While I never used HyperCard, the ‘low floors and high ceilings’ makes me think of spreadsheets. Given that I code all day professionally, I have quite a high bar for using code to solve personal needs, but I love to use spreadsheets - there’s just enough automation to make powerful, useful mini-applications, quickly, without much complexity, and the presentation capabilities are very strong. While there is brittleness - I can share a budget sheet with my wife and it will be broken in minutes - it’s easy to fix and evolve, but most importantly, they are accessible and grokable for someone without much technical knowledge. I guess spreadsheet apps are pretty self-contained so I’m not sure that composability is a strength.
4y ago

donatj 4y ago

The seeming death of software that empowers users never ceases to make me sad. We have this machine of near limitless power and endless possibilities, and yet we do everything in our power to make doing things yourself esoteric. You have to pay someone to develop simple things you should absolutely be able to do yourself. When I was a pre-teen my computer booted up to BASIC. I taught largely by guessing commands. I created many simple graphical games drawing lines and circles. SCREEN 12 LINE 0 0 640 480 5 Imagine being a pre-teen today and just trying to draw a line to the screen. Several hundred lines of boilerplate. We've lost more than we've gained.

yamtaddle 4y ago
<!DOCTYPE html><hr />
- zerocrates 4y ago
  Lose the unnecessary self-close and you're really efficient.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Still holding out hope that sanity will return to the web and we'll bring back xhtml, I guess.
elcaro 4y ago
The closest thing these days is probably p5js (Processing in JS). function setup() { createCanvas(640, 480) } function draw() { background(0, 100, 200) strokeWeight(100) stroke(200, 200, 0) line(0, 0, 640, 480) } There's an online editor so pre-teens (or indeed post-teens) can get started right away (https://editor.p5js.org https://editor.p5js.org) but I'll admit there's still quite a hurdle if you want to host yourself, or run offline.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
4y ago

johnohara 4y ago

Leave it to Douglas Adams to talk about Hypercard and leave you thinking differently about giraffes.

talkingtab 4y ago

I keep trying to understand why Hypercard was good. Although I agree with the points in the article, I guess/think/suspect that there was more to it than that. One of the things that struck me when I fired up Hypercard.sheepvm was that what came out of Hypercard is very different than what comes out of html/css/javascript. The same way that if you paint with a palette knife versus a paint brush, what comes out is different. As a thought experiment, since I am currently building a website, I started using Hypercard to mock up the web UI. It is immediately different. (Yes I know there is the black&white vs colors). Does anyone have any thoughts on that or why that would be?

bigiain 4y ago
> I keep trying to understand why Hypercard was good. I reckon it’s like the GUI version of BASIC. It was, as other comments point out, kinda toy-like, but in a good way as well as a bad way. It gave Mac users a way to “play” with their Mac and make it do their bidding in much the same way that BASIC interpreters built into pre-GUI home computers did. It was half way between magic and godlike power - at least for some people. It gave a very low barrier to entry feeling of “Oh, I get it now. I can make this machine do what I want it to do. I am in control now!” In my head, Director or Flash was the next equivalent tool in that niche.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

If you want something like hypercard this looks cool: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker There's a link to a browser version there too