3 ms·

I thought the same when I read the article -- they missed the point of the programmability, and some of the downfall of hypercard (it was an unholy mess to sort

I thought the same when I read the article -- they missed the point of the programmability, and some of the downfall of hypercard (it was an unholy mess to sort out a badly written stack.) Sometimes I wonder if the spiritual successor of hypercard was in fact Visual Basic.

joezydeco 13y ago
I believe it was indeed VB. Remember that HyperCard was introduced in 1987 or so, the GUI/WIMP era was just getting started. The learning curve of writing a Macintosh application was incredibly steep - nearly impossible IMO - but here was a way to make a simple point-and-click app that actually did something (write to a file, do some calculations, show information, even talk out the serial port, etc) with a minimal amount of lifting. My first paid piece of software was a point-of-sale application written in HyperCard. And it worked just fine. VB was pretty much the equivalent for Windows, once it came along.
- dahjelle 13y ago
  Has their been a successor to VB? The web is close in some respects (HTML is easy) and not in others (servers and single-page apps are not). I suppose, in another respect, Excel is a successor for many, though it isn't a good solution for making apps of any sort. Surprisingly, the closest I've seen has been Microsoft's Project Siena[1]. I've not used it extensively, but my 5 or 10 minute made it look like it had the dirt-simple-to-get-started appeal of HyperCard and VB. Anyone know of other "spiritual successors" out there? [1] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-project-siena/5ae47651-e8f3-4e41-aab7-e19ab1b80180 http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-projec...
  - freehunter 13y ago
    As a non-programmer, I've been looking for a VB successor for a long time.
    - dahjelle 13y ago
      Not sure if either of these are useful to you, but there are some interesting projects in LiveCode[1] and in Alpha Anywhere[2]. I've not used either. I'm hoping Mozilla's AppMaker[3] comes to something, but I haven't been able to actually make it work yet. I can't say that I find any of these really (yet) hitting the sweet spot that HyperCard did, but that may be my own ignorance. :-D [1] http://livecode.com/ http://livecode.com/ [2] http://alphasoftware.com/ http://alphasoftware.com/ [3] https://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/ https://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      I wouldn't call it a VB replacement but have a look at processing.org
Tloewald 13y ago
VB was clearly influenced by Hypercard. Likewise HTML. In many ways (including performance) VB was a huge regression from Hypercard (I was working on a multimedia project in VB3 in 1994 and a 25MHz 68040 running HyperCard simply blew away a 486DX66 with more of everything running VB3). HyperCard was probably one of the most influential pieces of software ever written. It still has one direct clone ("Livecode") being sold commercially, and I believe Director (whose programming language started as an inferior clone of HyperTalk) is still being sold by Adobe. It was also an incredibly stable programming environment. Back in an era when computers in general were as flaky as hell, you could work on it all day and experience nary a crash (and since it saved everything by default you tended not to lose anything even when it did crash).

joezydeco 13y ago

I believe it was indeed VB. Remember that HyperCard was introduced in 1987 or so, the GUI/WIMP era was just getting started. The learning curve of writing a Macintosh application was incredibly steep - nearly impossible IMO - but here was a way to make a simple point-and-click app that actually did something (write to a file, do some calculations, show information, even talk out the serial port, etc) with a minimal amount of lifting. My first paid piece of software was a point-of-sale application written in HyperCard. And it worked just fine. VB was pretty much the equivalent for Windows, once it came along.

dahjelle 13y ago
Has their been a successor to VB? The web is close in some respects (HTML is easy) and not in others (servers and single-page apps are not). I suppose, in another respect, Excel is a successor for many, though it isn't a good solution for making apps of any sort. Surprisingly, the closest I've seen has been Microsoft's Project Siena[1]. I've not used it extensively, but my 5 or 10 minute made it look like it had the dirt-simple-to-get-started appeal of HyperCard and VB. Anyone know of other "spiritual successors" out there? [1] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-project-siena/5ae47651-e8f3-4e41-aab7-e19ab1b80180 http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-projec...
- freehunter 13y ago
  As a non-programmer, I've been looking for a VB successor for a long time.
  - dahjelle 13y ago
    Not sure if either of these are useful to you, but there are some interesting projects in LiveCode[1] and in Alpha Anywhere[2]. I've not used either. I'm hoping Mozilla's AppMaker[3] comes to something, but I haven't been able to actually make it work yet. I can't say that I find any of these really (yet) hitting the sweet spot that HyperCard did, but that may be my own ignorance. :-D [1] http://livecode.com/ http://livecode.com/ [2] http://alphasoftware.com/ http://alphasoftware.com/ [3] https://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/ https://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    I wouldn't call it a VB replacement but have a look at processing.org

Tloewald 13y ago

VB was clearly influenced by Hypercard. Likewise HTML. In many ways (including performance) VB was a huge regression from Hypercard (I was working on a multimedia project in VB3 in 1994 and a 25MHz 68040 running HyperCard simply blew away a 486DX66 with more of everything running VB3). HyperCard was probably one of the most influential pieces of software ever written. It still has one direct clone ("Livecode") being sold commercially, and I believe Director (whose programming language started as an inferior clone of HyperTalk) is still being sold by Adobe. It was also an incredibly stable programming environment. Back in an era when computers in general were as flaky as hell, you could work on it all day and experience nary a crash (and since it saved everything by default you tended not to lose anything even when it did crash).