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Hi! I'll bite. Two questions for you. VB and Hypercard get a lot of nostalgic love these days, and a lot of people (including ITT) maintain there aren't any re

by pfraze 12y ago

Hi! I'll bite. Two questions for you. VB and Hypercard get a lot of nostalgic love these days, and a lot of people (including ITT) maintain there aren't any real successors to them. What would you consider to be the standout merits to Ruby/VB that ought to be reproduced now? Second question, since plugins and dynamic extension are never out of style: in the VBX interface, what did you think worked well, and what did you think was a tremendous disaster? Thanks!

Stratoscope 12y ago
Ah, if you're looking for insights, I may not have too many of those. It was a long time ago! But let me see what I can remember. The big thing about VB is the obvious one: it was really easy to get started using it, and despite the flaws in the visual environment and the language itself, it was good enough to get things done. In fact, Basic was a lot better than the language we were originally going to put in, which was barely more than a glorified batch language (and not even as powerful as .bat). The idea we had at the beginning was that you'd drag an arrow on the screen from one component to another, signifying that an event triggered on the first component would make an action happen on the other. This is where the phrase "fire an event" came from: I was looking for a verb for this, and "trigger" didn't sound right. I was frustrated and had a bunch of rubber bands on the table, so I started firing them at the screen. That didn't help. So I fired up a doobie, and between flicking the lighter and firing the rubber bands, "fire an event" seemed like the phrase to use. What worked well in VBX? Well again it was fairly simple to use and easy for people to make extensions with. The big disaster was that it was pretty much tied into the Win16 programming model, so when Windows moved to 32 bits, VBX wasn't going to cut it and Microsoft developed OCX to replace it.
- m0zzie 12y ago
  So I fired up a doobie, and between flicking the lighter and firing the rubber bands, "fire an event" seemed like the phrase to use. There's something strangely surreal and downright awesome about reading this comment from you, over 25 years later. Huge amounts of respect for what you and the team achieved.
  - Stratoscope 12y ago
    Thank you! We always tried to have fun with the names. Alas, my other favorite name didn't make it into the final product. VB Controls were called Gizmos in Ruby, and VBX was the Gizmo Interface. I don't know what happened there - I think Gizmo was just not a serious enough name for the Microsoft of the day. But really, Control instead of Gizmo? Boring!
soapdog 12y ago
There is a successor for HyperCard these days. It has a similar language, it can import HyperCard stacks, it is crossplatform (windows, mac, linux, android and iOS) and it is open source. Its called LiveCode and is available at http://livecode.com http://livecode.com

by pfraze 12y ago

Stratoscope 12y ago

Ah, if you're looking for insights, I may not have too many of those. It was a long time ago! But let me see what I can remember. The big thing about VB is the obvious one: it was really easy to get started using it, and despite the flaws in the visual environment and the language itself, it was good enough to get things done. In fact, Basic was a lot better than the language we were originally going to put in, which was barely more than a glorified batch language (and not even as powerful as .bat). The idea we had at the beginning was that you'd drag an arrow on the screen from one component to another, signifying that an event triggered on the first component would make an action happen on the other. This is where the phrase "fire an event" came from: I was looking for a verb for this, and "trigger" didn't sound right. I was frustrated and had a bunch of rubber bands on the table, so I started firing them at the screen. That didn't help. So I fired up a doobie, and between flicking the lighter and firing the rubber bands, "fire an event" seemed like the phrase to use. What worked well in VBX? Well again it was fairly simple to use and easy for people to make extensions with. The big disaster was that it was pretty much tied into the Win16 programming model, so when Windows moved to 32 bits, VBX wasn't going to cut it and Microsoft developed OCX to replace it.

m0zzie 12y ago
So I fired up a doobie, and between flicking the lighter and firing the rubber bands, "fire an event" seemed like the phrase to use. There's something strangely surreal and downright awesome about reading this comment from you, over 25 years later. Huge amounts of respect for what you and the team achieved.
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  Thank you! We always tried to have fun with the names. Alas, my other favorite name didn't make it into the final product. VB Controls were called Gizmos in Ruby, and VBX was the Gizmo Interface. I don't know what happened there - I think Gizmo was just not a serious enough name for the Microsoft of the day. But really, Control instead of Gizmo? Boring!

soapdog 12y ago

There is a successor for HyperCard these days. It has a similar language, it can import HyperCard stacks, it is crossplatform (windows, mac, linux, android and iOS) and it is open source. Its called LiveCode and is available at http://livecode.com http://livecode.com