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Why Hypercard Had to Die

184 points by uros643 15y ago

makecheck 15y ago
Actually has a really good example (a calculator) to show how HyperCard could be used. HyperCard was a big part of my junior high years. It could even be extended, e.g. there was one add-on that allowed color graphics to be displayed and I learned to make some simple games that way.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  But its not a good example. You're sitting at a device with a numeric keypad, and a 9" screen; Replicating the calculator interface in clickable buttons, with a textbox as simulated LCD is a horrible misuse of the potential of a computing environment. A screen, a keyboard and a hardware ALU. Being used to run an OS which draws some keys and a screen, interprets mouse movements, parses and interprets Applescript and parses text arithmetic operations, so it can pretend to be some keys and a screen connected to a hardware ALU. And this is hailed by our "anti-bloat" author as a great example of simplicity which normal people love, and its limits are fine, compared to any other system - e.g. Visual Basic 3 - which is needlessly complex. It's almost funny, until you read his seven tenets of computing and find that any program which encounters any error should enter a debugger, so you can fix it and carry on. I think that would drive anyone insane.
  - thaumaturgy 15y ago
    I don't think the calculator was intended as an example of a great program, or of the "potential of a computing environment". I think it was intended to be a very straightforward example of something that anybody could make as a practice project in HyperCard. If you're new to programming, "make a calculator" is a great project. It involves simple math -- which you probably already understand -- simple operations, and simple concepts. It also illustrates some of HyperCard's strengths. I can't think of any other development environment in which "make a calculator" would be a suitable project for the end of the first week of a programming class. And, in the end, the programmer gets something that they can look at and interact with, and which can be easily extended. ("OK, now make it do factorials!") > It's almost funny, until you read his seven tenets of computing and find that any program which encounters any error should enter a debugger, so you can fix it and carry on. I think that would drive anyone insane. I wish it worked that way! Yes, if programs were constantly crashing into debuggers, it would drive people nuts. Absolutely, no argument there. But, I would hope that that alone would motivate programmers to make them crash less. What we have instead are mysterious black boxes, and I hate that. But, I'm on the end-user support side of things. Here, let me give you some examples of stuff we've dealt with in our little shop in just the last few days: 1. An iMac that hates booting. Sometimes it boots, sometimes it won't. We invoke "verbose" mood, we get some sort of helpful text, and then it all goes away to a black screen. Or, it decides, "OK, all done with verbose mode!", switches to a gray screen, and hangs. Or, we attempt an install from any of our sets of install DVDs, and the most helpful error message we can dig out of any log anywhere is, "i/o error in dvd-rom" (or something similar). It is literally impossible for us to pinpoint the source of the hardware trouble without shotgun replacing every one of the major components in the machine. 2. A FreeBSD system that occasionally does a hard hang. No error log, anywhere. At all. Just halts. Hardware problem? Software problem? 3. An Acer Aspire One with all kinds of really unhelpful error messages in the system logs. Everything seems to be glitching everywhere. Ah, but Windows 7 helpfully generated a mini-dump file of just one of the crashes. Maybe we can track down a bad driver? Let's see, we'll just find and install dumpchk.exe and ... hmm, need to fix debugger symbols for this and ... wait, there's no stack trace? ... uhm ... oh look, it has a "probable cause" at the bottom: "hardware". That's helpful? I know I'm forgetting some. Anyway, it's like this for us all the time. I used to know & love MacsBug. Even with the old MacOS programmer's switch, I could occasionally figure out something useful. I would love it if, instead of calls like, "my computer is stuck at a black screen, should I reboot?", we'd get calls like, "my computer just went to this black screen that says null pointer exception at a bunch of numbers in iaStor.sys". And, even better, if we were so inclined, we could notify software vendors of the specific errors we ran across, so we could do a better job of helping them track down bugs.
    - jodrellblank 15y ago
      It also illustrates some of HyperCard's strengths. I can't think of any other development environment in which "make a calculator" would be a suitable project for the end of the first week of a programming class. Visual Basic 3? What we have instead are mysterious black boxes, and I hate that. But, I'm on the end-user support side of things. Here, let me give you some examples of stuff we've dealt with in our little shop in just the last few days: I don't need examples - I wrote my comment on a phone, and twice it popped up Input system error. The system is being restarted, which, it seems, is a spell-check problem. And that's a system which does me more annoyance than good even when it's working normally. We have a firewall with a subsystem which crashes when enabled, and the manufacturer says it's a known problem with no estimated fix time, the only option is to disable that feature - one of their main selling points of the device. A web server, showing problematic memory use and no process using it. GVim on Windows 7 x64 - I could (not sure if I can remember what it was now) repeatedly make it hang, not just itself but also the entire OS, with an operation on a large file which is instant on Linux. Yet Task manager shows no high CPU or memory or disk use. Anyway, it's like this for us all the time. Yes, but it's a fallacy to think I could practically do anything about it if only it wasn't so black box like. Do you really have time and motivation to become expert enough in all the things you deal with that you could fix any problem if only it was more explorable? You may as well ask a restaurant if you can watch the staff cook all your food over their shoulders so you can intercept and change things if you think it's going in a direction you don't want. Even if you are able to taste too much sugar in an Apple Pie, it doesn't follow that you could remove the sugar if only you were in the kitchen watching how much was put in (it's dissolved by then), and it doesn't follow that you could tell if too much was put in just by looking - it depends on how sweet the apples are, and whether the sweetness changes with length of baking. See also: the idea of systemantics. And what am I going to do when it's your webserver crashing, or your iCloud server, or DropBox, or if it's my car navigation system or my phone's spell checker? But, I would hope that that alone would motivate programmers to make them crash less. Programmers don't make software that crashes for fun, you know. If it took no effort, they would make programs which don't crash right now. But it does take effort, and that's a limited resource which needs to be traded off.
      - 15y ago
  - sambeau 15y ago
    Have you never watched a video on your PC depute owning a perfectly serviceable TV?
    - jodrellblank 15y ago
      Yes. I have also loaded up an OS and browser built on a cross-platform GUI framework and a TCP-IP stack, and used it to do a DNS lookup and send a HTTP compliant request across a tangle of hundreds of miles of interconnected systems to Google's servers to statistically analyse my query, run it through around 700 servers, through an index of several billion web pages, and thousands of years of Youtube videos, millions of pictures, hundreds of thousands of news articles and twitter streams, ranking the results, and at the top putting the results of my calculation "2+1" or whatever. But then, I'm not the author with the weirdo view of 'simple'. What's your point?
  - asciilifeform 15y ago
    > It's almost funny, until you read his seven tenets of computing and find that any program which encounters any error should enter a debugger, so you can fix it and carry on. I think that would drive anyone insane. You prefer inexplicable crashes? Now these are enough to drive someone mad. And if you do prefer them, wire your debugger to a Blue Screen of Death emulation.
shib71 15y ago
Visual Basic played a similar role for me many years ago. I've moved on since, but at the time it was exactly what I needed. The value of a WYSIWYG GUI editor and a simple event system to a budding developer can't be overstated.
Yhippa 15y ago
FTA: "And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then read this post again." I always hope in the back of my mind that someday there will be a way to create a web interface as easily as you could in Hypercard. I miss it so much.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  No such luck. The Web architecture inherently sucks: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/internet-haters http://philip.greenspun.com/research/internet-haters
  - groby_b 15y ago
    Take that article with a large grain of salt. Much of it has been proven wrong by now. ("HTML is where the Web starts and probably where it will end.")
    - irrumator 15y ago
      Take anything from loper-os with a massive grain of salt, he is a long-term troll who has been writing these sorts of wistful but ultimately empty posts for several years now. Calling everything and everyone stupid and bloated and yearning for the good old days is his thing. I only mention this because some HN readers might not be fully aware of his history.
      - asciilifeform 15y ago
        The distinction between a "troll" and an actual human with unpopular opinions is lost on you? You aren't the only one: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91
      - eropple 15y ago
        I don't think loper-os is a troll. I think there are some fundamental social deficiencies at play (the profoundly arrogant and strange README in his SVN trunk is a must-see), but I believe he genuinely means what he says.
iradik 15y ago
I think it'd be interesting to re-write HyperCard in javascript and HTML5, as a way to get kids interested in coding (and maybe use javascript instead of apple script as the card language?). Not sure how difficult this would be as I've never actually used it, only heard of it's majesty and wonder. Cool that you can still run it on an emulator. I'll have to try it out.
siglesias 15y ago
Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? I fail to see his point. Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler, and that's part of the reason you have so many amateur apps on the App Store. Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are talking about a company that was 90 days from bankruptcy when he took over. I think he made a good decision. If somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard for the Mac, what in the last 13 years has stopped them? It wasn't Jobs.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  > Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler... "Simple" and "pleasant" are different things. Digging a trench deep enough to bury a car is "simple." > Has this guy played with Interface Builder lately? Yes, actually I have played with it. It makes me want to vomit. The whole NextStep stack does, in fact. Because I have used OpenGenera. And HyperCard. > if somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard, what in the last 13 years has stopped them? Here's a example from an unrelated field. The Kalashnikov rifle is more than half a century old. Why has nothing replaced it as the world's most popular weapon of war? Often, complexity and full-featuredness is precisely what people don't want.
  - groby_b 15y ago
    Broken example - the Kalashnikov is still very much available, while HyperCard is at best a historical curiosity. And it _has_ been upgraded to the AK74, which means it's a quarter century. It also has been transformed into the Type 56, the SG550 or the Galil. Where is that progress with regards to HyperCard?
    - asciilifeform 15y ago
      Mikhail Kalashnikov did not regard the 74 as an improvement. The project was moved forward against his objections. And HyperCard did indeed end up reincarnated as cheap imitations, just like the Chinese Type 56. The analogy holds. Can't comment on the other two -- small arms aren't really my field.
groby_b 15y ago
Sigh. Maybe instead of ranting at your "typical software engineer", the author should spend a moment to consider that maybe it "could be built again" - but it never has. So the question then turns to, why has it never been built? Is it maybe because Hypercard (and other visual systems) become entirely unmaintainable once we get to large-scale systems? And maybe it is because most people don't want a trivialized programming environment? They either want a full system, or just a product?
- dahjelle 15y ago
  > They either want a full system, or just a product. While I think this is true at the moment, it seems that there is an interesting question behind that, as well. Why don't more people want to create their own software? I do think the author has an implicit point: because, frankly, creating software stinks. Jon Skeet's talk [1] demonstrates this admirably. I spend a shockingly large part of my time working around bugs and leaky abstractions in other software rather than implementing my own ideas. I don't know if it is possible to design a system with a solid enough abstraction that these problems don't exist. I do know that HyperCard came unusually close, as I know several folks who made HyperCard stacks who wouldn't imagine creating software in any typical fashion. I hold out hope that such a useful system could be created again, one that gives people enough flexibility to create software solutions of their own (perhaps within a genre of software) and that is able to combat the currently-accurate stigma of programming being "hard". [1] http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-ponies-aka-humanity-epic-fail.aspx http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-pon...
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    Lego Mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/ http://mindstorms.lego.com/) is kind of like Hypercard for the modern age. It's got interesting applications (robotics and automation), and an easy-to-learn programming environment. I'd say it's the perfect product for a budding geek to cut her teeth on.
  - groby_b 15y ago
    Hm. I've never seen a HyperCard project that was both maintainable and of a large-ish size. I think _that_ is where the HyperCard idea broke down - navigating through a bunch of cards is significantly more difficult than through a bunch of text files. Granted, that _may_ be a question of the tools. But I do find it telling that in the long time since the "death" of HyperCard nobody could come up with compelling tools. And creating software is hard because ultimately, it requires analytical thinking. Which, by itself, is hard. Yes, the choice of tool modulates the hardness of the problem - but the underlying issues are still hard. (Note: I do not claim non-programmers _can't_ reason analytically. I claim the effort/result ratio is not right for them) It's the same reason most people buy furniture instead of building it. Acquiring the necessary skill set is simply too much effort for the result.
jawngee 15y ago
Umm, SuperCard still exists and is under active development. Even back in the day it was superior to HyperCard in every way. My guess was that HyperCard was killed because the WWW was coming. I used SuperCard pretty heavily back in '92ish at the second college in Minnesota to get the internet (MCAD - U of M was first). I remember the rows of NeXT boxes they had, the only machines connected and I remember fumbling around with building Gopher sites as well as some basic HTML hacking, as basic as it was back then. I lost interest in HyperCard/SuperCard shortly thereafter. But it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. I don't know that this guy had exposure to any of this hence the short sightedness and, in my opinion, miscalculation of Job's motives.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  > the WWW was coming. In 1998? > it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. I have used all of these, and beg to differ. The spirit of HyperCard was that of radical simplicity, and it does not live in these systems.
  - jawngee 15y ago
    > > the WWW was coming. > In 1998? I built my first HTML page in '93. NCSA Mosaic was the rage in the lab. > > it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, > > Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. > > I have used all of these, and beg to differ. The spirit of > HyperCard was that of radical simplicity, and it does not > live in these systems. ??? Drag and drop, double click to add script, how is that not the spirit of HyperCard? HyperCard was the preeminent RAD development tool. Easier than Visual Basic? Sure, but not by much. The gap between BASIC and HyperTalk is not that great a leap. If you can't see the parallels between Macromedia Director and HyperCard, you're being blinded by your own weird sense of what's what - considering they both used the same basic language back then.
    - asciilifeform 15y ago
      Hypercard is different from systems like Director in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.
ezy 15y ago
This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Hypercard was the BASIC of the Macintosh in that it served the same niche. It certainly was not BASIC, but the idea was the same, a little language and environment that fit into the machine's environment that allowed novices (and then highly practiced novices :-)) to create stuff on the machine for other people to use. It was killed for the same reason BASIC, in the sense of built-in 8bit micro BASIC, kind of fell to the wayside except as a way to stitch existing apps together. No one is really impressed by a calculator program anymore. Matching the capabilities of modern software is hard nowadays. It's demotivating to create a calculator program... that's it? Hypercard really can't match even JS, et al. in functionality. I remember when it started to happen in the 16bit era. Software was already starting to get too good and too complex for a simple tool. I got an Amiga. The Amiga had a built-in BASIC -- but no one used it. Why? Because there was no fucking way you were going to recreate even the bouncing ball demo in BASIC. It wasn't going to happen. Essentially, anything you created was going to be a huge disappointment with that tool. This was not necessarily true in the 8bit days -- but from 16bit on, you either learned assembly/C or gave up. People can learn in that environment (and did), but the barrier was much higher. Lowering that barrier while coming close to the capability of "real" software is a hard problem. Fortunately, it's coming full circle. Now that machines are powerful enough that "real" software is being written in interpreters, JS seems like it actually is the new BASIC. I'm not totally sold on that -- because the stack is too too baroque (although, again, people do learn in that environment). Processing is perilously close but not quite there because it's so domain specific. Python comes with a lot, but doesn't fit into native environments very well. If I had to chose, I'd say it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack in the same way 8bit BASIC sat over the primitive OS at the time.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  > This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Tell that to the thousands of otherwise non-programming people who developed real, useful applications (some of them best-selling) in Hypercard. > it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack Like building a castle on a swamp. Foundations matter: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55
ricardobeat 15y ago
He's kind of pissed off. I see nothing special with it except for the "natural" language.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  The "natural" language is actually the weakest part.
  - Luyt 15y ago
    Because it really isn't natural at all, it only looks natural. AppleScript is a kind of COBOL. You have to know exactly what (natural-sounding) keywords and clauses you can use. Try some real natural language and the interpreter is suddenly lost.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  Y'know, I can see where he's coming from. I'll get to that in a moment, but first: I'm starting to get a little sick of HN's tone lately. I'll readily admit that I've contributed to that in the past, but some of the comments in this thread ("person is a troll", "writes vacuous posts", "is a crackpot") are really over the top asinine. He's a better person than I am, because if it were me, I'd already have a script in place that checked the referrer and would post a blank page with "Eat a dick" for anybody coming from HN. If nothing else, it would ensure that the submission wouldn't get as many upvotes (or would get flagged) and I wouldn't feel compelled to put up with the abuse. Anyway: So, IIRC, my progression as a young programmer went something like: BASIC on a Commodore 64 / Vic-20, to Logo on I-don't-remember, to HyperCard (and then on to QBasic and Pascal and C and C++ and OOP and on and on). HyperCard was amazing because its barrier-to-entry was so, so low, and I agree with the author's comments that there still isn't anything quite like it. For one thing, it was on most Macs by default at the time, so you didn't have to find a copy of the software and install it first. As he shows, it was a piece of cake to get started with. A budding HyperCard programmer could easily learn new tricks by downloading anybody's stack and reading the code. Since it wasn't compiled, you could learn from it. Anything that anybody else did, you could take apart, and learn how to do. And it grew with you. You could make something as simple or as complex as you wanted. My very first, very naive foray into AI was in HyperTalk; I discovered I could write self-modifying stacks, and decided to see if I could teach a HyperTalk stack to talk to me like a person. HyperCard also introduced me to online forums for the first time. I still remember, fondly, downloading J5iverson's XFCNs from eWorld. From there, I discovered the world of the early internet -- the alternative to BBSs. Whereas BBSs at the time let me easily chat with someone else in my town (or, more often, play TradeWars or something), eWorld let me chat with people "across the pond" for the first time. For a young kid, this was a life-changing, world-shrinking event. I disagree with the comments that SuperCard is a reasonable alternative. I don't remember the details now, but while I appreciated the addition of color in SuperCard, it brought with it other complexities that I disliked. I played around with SuperCard but ultimately went back to HyperCard. So, what I'm getting at is, if it weren't for HyperCard, I don't think I'd be a programmer right now. HyperCard was simple enough for a beginner, and rich enough to keep my interest. It was a huge influence on me. I really can't overstate that. Almost two decades later, I was approached by an employer who wanted me to teach computer programming to his son. His son was young, not yet in high school, pretty sharp, and, y'know, geeky. Liked video games, liked taking things apart. Not exactly a challenging pupil in terms of motivation. I spent a ton of time trying to figure out just what in the hell environment to use to teach him. JavaScript? You have to know a lot of other stuff before you can really begin to do anything of value in JavaScript. Before we could do the calculator example in the author's blog post in JavaScript, I'd have to teach basics of HTML, the DOM, and eventually we'd either end up using JQuery or going over the whole "browsers are different in how they handle the same code" discussion, which, honestly, is one of the most stupid problems in the history of computing when you think about it. Anyway, I went through a bunch of options and finally settled on something called Kids Programming Language (or Phrogram). What a damned mess that was. It wasn't very long before I had to teach the concept of objects to the kid. And scope. And then half the time the entire environment would just up and crash with no helpful explanation. There's a fun problem for a newbie programmer: write some code, your environment crashes, no explanation. If the field has improved much since then, I'm unaware of it. Not having something like HyperCard available to young programmers really is a tragedy, because it means that future programmers are going to be introduced to programming in college (which, often, is a joke, and IMO also too late in an individual's mental development), or they're going to have to tough it out through JavaScript or Ruby or Python or whatever the inscrutable popular language-of-the-month is, and that's going to really narrow down the field of people interested in getting into programming. Some free market adherents might respond with, "Well, if there was demand, someone would build it, so obviously there's no demand". Honestly, I find that entire argument completely boring. It's clear that there was a lot of demand for it; did nobody want it before it was invented, and has nobody wanted it since it became no longer supported? I don't think so. I think there is a market for such a thing, and it just hasn't been built yet. I really hope it will be. It's already on my list of near-future projects if nobody else does it first.
boopboop 15y ago
Filemaker is similar to Hypercard.. http://www.filemaker.com/ http://www.filemaker.com/
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  Quite a few things are detectably similar to Hypercard. Even MS Visual Studio. None of them have the love-at-first-sight appeal. Most seem like an unbearable ordeal once you've used the real thing.
- derefr 15y ago
  You know what's actually the product I've met with the most similarity to HyperCard? Microsoft PowerPoint. You have cards, buttons that can navigate between them in arbitrary ways, effects that can trigger on loading or unloading a card, etc. And for everything else, you have VBA, which, like AppleScript, allows buttons and fields to do arbitrary things (with generic COM objects, even!) I once wrote a full-scale Dragon-Quest-style CRPG in PowerPoint, using the cards as a scene graph; it was actually quite friendly.
  - mutagen 15y ago
    There's some truth to this (as appalling as the notion is). While I'm teaching Python to my 7th grade nephew his school is having him 'program' in Powerpoint. As dismissive as I am of the notion, it does allow students to quickly get some stuff up on the screen and start being interactive. Fortunately my nephew has taken to Python and is even starting to become a language snob "That looks like a stupid way to program".
    - derefr 15y ago
      Hmm... putting PowerPoint and Python side-by-side reminds me a little of Shoes (http://shoesrb.com/ http://shoesrb.com/), which is also something that "allow[s] students to quickly get some stuff up on the screen and start being interactive", but is purely code-based, rather than having any sort of GUI interface construction tool.
toddmorey 15y ago
A bit of trivia: MYST, the CD-ROM game, was first shipped for the Mac and written entirely in HyperCard (with a few custom extensions to load the color graphics as quickly as possible).
gcanyon 15y ago
The code for this could have simpler/less verbose. It's been a while, but I believe in the number buttons this would have worked: put the short name of me after fld "lcd" and in the equals sign button: put the value of fld "lcd" into fld "lcd" (edited to fix a missing quote)
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  Thanks! Also there is an extra eval (the first one is unnecessary, I think.) But I am too lazy to revise the screenshots.
deleted 15y ago
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resnamen 15y ago
HyperCard is very near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid I taught myself how to program with Hypercard. I'm a software developer today, and despite the crazy verbose syntax of HyperTalk, I still acquired an intuition for programming that remains helpful, 15 years later. I actually approached Steve Jobs about the demise of Hypercard in 1998, when I was 15, at the Seybold SF conference. IIRC he gave a pretty dismissive response about it, basically saying that there wouldn't be a market for it anymore. It was pretty obvious that he didn't care about HyperCard or HyperCard-like products anymore. That, or he didn't want punk teenagers questioning his business strategy. As a side note, I got my photo taken with him. When the photo was developed I saw that I was wearing a megawatt smile (shit, I met with Steve Jobs!), and Steve was looking distractedly at something in the corner.
resnamen 15y ago
I think HyperCard was special in that other people's stacks were easy to come by, and easy to disassemble. There was no compiled distributable form, all stacks could be cracked open if you wanted to see how they ticked, and just modified just as easily if you wanted to see how the program's behavior would change.
evolve2k 15y ago
I remember making a game with hyper card when I was at school and loved that I could visually script the buttons. We hand drew pictures of 3D rooms and then scanned them in and put big invisible buttons over the doors etc. I personally think the www killed hyper card, suddenly you could do very similar things but have them instantly shared globally. In my mind hypercards real innovation was creating your own links which would take you to any other card you desired, I think plain old simple HTML came along and killed the poor thing. HyperCard lived in a time of share it on a disc and I imagine Jobs seeing it's days as numbered.
- dahjelle 15y ago
  Bill Atkinson, the creator of Hypercard, is on record [1] wishing he'd had the foresight to extend the links to the network. Hypercard was inches away from being the first "web browser". [1] http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/08/54370 http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/0...
pnathan 15y ago
The author makes a very valid point: the modern Way of personal computing is about the controlled user experience; allowing people to get their mess all over with their own work would disrupt that Way. Don't appreciate the crack about the 'aspie software engineer' though. Definitely not needed.
edtechdev 15y ago
I was sad to see Hypercard abandoned - I learned how to program with it myself (along with Perl & CGI apps - syntax didn't matter so much as what you could accomplish with it). But part of the reason I think is that Steve Jobs abandoned going primarily after the education market when he returned to Apple - he had already been burned by it (or become disillusioned by it) at Next, but also really Apple had already saturated the education market. He and Apple focused on the consumer market (imacs, ipods, etc.) - the business market had already been won by Microsoft. Microsoft also already had a more successful end-user friendly programming/scripting environment: Visual Basic and VBA. In case some don't know, Visual Basic was the most popular programming language in the world until overtaken by Java. VB didn't really start to significantly decline until more people developing business apps switched to C# and other languages. Microsoft also won with a more popular tool for creating visual 'stacks' or presentations: Powerpoint. Most educators were basically using hypercard/supercard/hyperstudio to create presentations - and Powerpoint made it easier to do so. Hypercard (and hypertalk) isn't dead though. Applescript is still around (despite Apple also trying to kill it). LiveCode and other options are still around and being updated for HTML5 & mobile platforms, as is Visual Basic, too (nsbasic). A java port of the hypertalk language is here: http://code.google.com/p/openxion/ http://code.google.com/p/openxion/ Natural language-like interfaces aren't dead, either. Look at testing tools like Cucumber, the google search engine, Siri, and so forth. Look at all the DSLs out there that try to make Ruby/Javascript/etc. more like natural languages, at least in certain contexts.
SimHacker 15y ago
Does anyone remember publishing HyperCard stacks on the web with the WebStar mac web server? That was pretty cool! It even translated the controls and fields on the stack to html forms that worked in the web browser. http://143.50.28.215/HyperCGI.html http://143.50.28.215/HyperCGI.html
commieneko 15y ago
Hypercard was a wonder. I used to teach street people how to make simple, useful applications that they thought of themselves. Sure it was limited in what it did, and that was part of its beauty. It was a tool for quickly hacking together a simple application. A tool that nearly anyone could learn to use quickly. And it was fun and spontaneous. And the Hypertalk language was very interesting to work in. It was like a limited dialect of a spoken language; a pidgin for computers.
jrmg 15y ago
I think much more likely explanations than the nefarious anti-creative one given for HyperCard's death are that, to varying degrees: Steve found all HyperCard stacks he saw to be messy and confusing, not at all the functional simplicity he was looking for; HyperCard was taking engineering resources and/or money that could be better spent saving the Mac, and therefore Apple. Apple has not, in recent years, on the Mac, been against trying to provide simpler programming environments - look at Automator, (the now also defunct?) AppleScript Studio, or Dashcode.
- david927 15y ago
  Simple programming environments have a fundamental flaw: they fool you. Let's say we have a type of perforated balsa wood that you can just snap into pieces and glue in place. Making a dog house just went from hours to minutes! Hurrah! So you start telling everyone that this is the new way to construct buildings, but then as you get bigger structures, it starts to fall apart. Simple programming environments fool you into thinking you into thinking your projects can scale, and the result is a mess. Hypercard was fun, but it wasn't a deep paradigm, it wasn't good syntax, and in the end, I have to say that it was good that it died.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    "Simple programming environments fool you into thinking you into thinking your projects can scale, and the result is a mess." Doesn't seem to have stopped Excel in particular, and spreadsheets in general, from being wildly succesful.
    - david927 15y ago
      Very good point. I think spreadsheets are just deep enough and map well enough to the domains that use them, that it can tread water. (Not swim, mind you.) They're also quite clear about their constraints.
      - arethuza 15y ago
almost 15y ago
Wow, that brings back some happy memories. Writing Eliza style chat bots on my Mac SE in Hypercard was a lot of fun :) Fun fact: the best selling game Myst was developed in Hypercard!
abecedarius 15y ago
Alan Kay's STEPS project drew some inspiration from Hypercard. I haven't gotten to try it, alas. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
phodo 15y ago
I recently discovered Quartz Composer, which is included on any Mac w/ Xcode, and I was pretty impressed by its capability. IMHO it is one of the best kept secrets of the apple-verse. While it is very different from Hypercard, it certainly provides a level of artistic expression and creative freedom that the article alludes is present in Hypercard. When I booted up QC for the first time a few months ago, I was blown away by its awesomeness. And then when I further explored the vibrant community out there AND the fact that it can be readily integrated into objective-c / cocoa, it's clear that Apple is very much in tune with what normal people and creative people need to express themselves on a computer. To get started, here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer and http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/graphics-and-animation.html http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/graphics-and-ani... Hint: If you have Xcode installed, simply type "quartz composer" into spotlight and begin your journey. A final note: I seem to recall but not certain that a) QC was an acquisition by Apple of a french company; and b) the original developer has moved on from Apple
nicpottier 15y ago
The thing I've always felt held back these paradigms is something that is inherent in them, they are too visual. That sounds crazy, but just look at this article and how he described what he did. He had to take a million screenshots to show it. The same is true for say, the Android app builder, or the Lego logic thing.. the way you sure code is via a screenshot. And that just doesn't scale very well I don't think. It makes copy/pasting, the most basic way that people learn, really difficult. HTML5 is pretty awesome, or rather WOULD be pretty awesome if we could erase the last 15 years and all start with CSS3 compliant browsers. But it is such a mess now that I feel bad for anybody starting from scratch. But the combination of HTML for layout and Javascript for layout is pretty darn powerful, and I think pretty accessible as well. You could certainly build something on the order of the simplicity of Hypercard on that stack. But I do like the author's comments about the shame that there are far fewer 'programmers' than back in the old days. BASIC on the AppleII is of course the other example (among others).. where it was just so easy and almost natural for ANY user to start getting a feel for things and hacking around. Losing that really IS a shame.
swdunlop 15y ago
There's no mystery, here. No great conspiracy -- the article has a screenshot of the smoking gun. http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/hypercard-calc/hc12.jpg http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/hypercard-calc/hc12.jpg The scripting language had a verbosity and ambiguity that only a lawyer could love. The documentation for that language was similarly impenetrable to anyone with a background in CS, requiring a serious commitment to trial and error to perform operations that were trivial in BASIC.
- sambeau 15y ago
  That is total conjecture and is not historically accurate. Hypercard was ridiculously popular and widely used amongst people who wouldn't ordinarily program (lawyers, historians, graphic designers etc). Hypercard was not aimed at CS graduates but even when if it was it comes from a time long before CS courses taught Java (And in many cases even C). This kind of verbose, human-readable scripting was exactly the sort of thing that a CS graduate would have experimented with along side the more traditional Pascal and Lisp.
- Someone 15y ago
  It looks that way, but it is not that verbose. Compare: get name of me put the value of the last word of it after card field "lcd" with it = event.target.name currentCard.fields["lcd"].append(it.text.asWords().last()) It looks verbose, and in some sense it is, but having lots of implicit state made it a nice environment for what it was.
timinman 15y ago
I loved Hypercard and BASIC too, but this post strikes me as being a little affected by nostalgia. With Hypercard you could make something for someone who 1) has an Apple, 2) Has Hypercard installed, and 3) Has the right version of Hypercard installed. With HTML/CSS/Javascript you can make something to run almost anywhere. It's not 'easy' but it is useful.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  > With HTML/CSS/Javascript you can make something to run almost anywhere. With gargantuan effort. And your creation will still appear distorted in unpredictable ways to many users.
SimHacker 15y ago
Who remembers the HyperCard Smut Stack? http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/HyperCard/message/28096 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/HyperCard/message/2809...
timinman 15y ago
Don't forget, there's Hackety Hack http://hackety-hack.com/ http://hackety-hack.com/ and Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://scratch.mit.edu/, two great tools for new programmers to get their feet wet and make something fun in the process!
Someone 15y ago
I think what killed Hypercard, in some sense, was what it made popular: like the Amiga, it was too closely tied to its hardware. HyperCard ran black and white windows of 512*342 pixels because that is what the original Mac had (there was a version that did some color things, but that was and felt like a serious bolt-on job). Moreover, all graphics where bitmaps. Bringing that into the 'real world' as it existed at the end of the eighties would have taken a lot of resources, and it was not guaranteed that the end result would still be HyperCard. For example, if one allowed resizable windows, laymen would have to learn about layout algorithms ('is this button 50 pixels wide, or a quarter screen wide? Is it 20 pixels from the bottom, 10% of screen height, or should its bottom border match that of that text field over there?'). Also, at the time, there were attempts to include some Hypercard/Director-like features to QuickTime. HyperCard was considered for that functionality, but did not make the cut.
- ayuvar 15y ago
  I think that versions of Hypercard past v1.0 allowed for stacks of arbitrary window size; I know for a fact that I made up at least a few 1024x768 ones in v2.2. You are correct in that I don't think it supported resizable windows without the use of some XCMD though.
  - Someone 15y ago
    You are correct. Surprisingly, I even found evidence for that: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA31048 http://support.apple.com/kb/TA31048: * All the cards in a given stack must be the same size, even if there are several different backgrounds in the stack. * Smallest card size: 64 x 64 pixels * Largest card size: 1280 x 1280 pixels.
RexRollman 15y ago
Hypercard was very interesting to me, enough so that I bought my first programming book, Danny Goodman's The Complete Hypercard Handbook. I loved tinkering about with Hypercard on my very first computer, a Powerbook 100 that I bought new in 1992. I was sad when Apple decided to only include Hypercard Player with new Macs, which I also think ultimately helped contribute to its death. People liked Hypercard but not enough to pay money for it. By the time Steve killed it, it was a lumbering zombie of its former self.
dahjelle 15y ago
I had a sudden hypothesis after reading this thread last night. (No proof, mind you, just an idea.) I wonder if HyperCard's success was for the same reason as UNIX's success: a well-chosen, small set of interoperable tools that allowed the user to do far more than the sum of their parts. And, as computing and interfaces have become more complex, we've just tacked on complexity to them rather than reinventing them to adapt. For instance, UNIX's treatment of everything as a file is a great tool, but I think there was a time where that simplified a much greater percentage of computing than it would today. Similarly, I suspect HyperCard died because the abstractions it was using had to be reimagined to stay competitive. Spreadsheets (as mentioned elsewhere) are an example of a product that has managed to stay focused on the simple set of tools, and, when features were tacked on, they often stay out of the way instead of adding complexity to day-to-day operations. However, I'm not sure they've aged well, but I guess they are the best we have at the moment.
- bad_user 15y ago
  IMHO, the Linux programming environment is a mess precisely because not everything is a file handler - not even sockets, as even though sockets can behave like files, there are differences. Plan9 was supposed to be the reinvention of Unix and a lot of useful stuff was ported from Plan9 to modern-day Linux, including the /proc filesystem which is really, really useful. Unfortunately the UNIX philosophy is so powerful that you don't understand it until you live and breathe UNIX. And it also doesn't scale for some use-cases, but this philosophy is the reason why UNIX is not only alive, but the dominant platform. Also, HyperCard is NOT a "small set of interoperable tools". And neither is Excel.
  - dahjelle 15y ago
    Though I haven't done any Linux programming, I can definitely see your point. A abstraction seems only as useful as it is consistent. You're right: HyperCard and Excel aren't a small set of interoperable tools like UNIX is. I would argue, though, that they are close: a walled garden of interoperable tools. Rather than guide you through steps to a specific end (the extreme example is a wizard for, say, a mail merge), they present you with tools you can use to get to that end. Obviously, they don't work particularly well outside their garden, and the great advantage of adding tools to your toolset is cumbersome at best. I do wish I understood the UNIX philosophy better. Perhaps I'll learn more over time.
soapdog 15y ago
HyperCard like systems are not dead. I make my living from LiveCode ( http://www.runrev.com http://www.runrev.com ) which is a xTalk system that is able to build applications for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. From a single HyperCard-like environment, I can build apps for all these platforms and reuse the code. LiveCode is very verbose and it may take a while for those that are already familiar with C-like languages but it is worth it. Software is easy to maintain and there is little space for confusion, even with few comments. RunRev company also release a PHP-like engine, so I can create web applications that communicate with native clients on mobile and desktop all from a single language and environment, this is very powerful. You should always use the best tool for your job. For my job, LiveCode fits perfectly. I also think that xTalk languages are a wonderful introduction to programming and people from non-technical backgrounds can learn it easily and start creating little tools to help their specific domains. Yes, anyone can learn programming in any language, it is just a matter of effort, I believe LiveCode makes this effort fun and productive. You may read this as advertisement but this is my personal opinion. I am 31 and have been using LiveCode since I was 25 or something like that. In the meantime I got married, got my own place and am living a good life. All my work is LiveCode related. Just telling you that so you guys don't take me for "someone that toys with this cute language every once in a while but is not serious". Even if you already have your favorite language, it is worth to check out LiveCode, just to learn what else is out there. There are beginner webinars starting next month I think...
- soapdog 15y ago
  oh... I forgot to tell, LiveCode can import HyperCard stacks... =)
dave_sullivan 15y ago
I remember using hyper studio (later version) in 5th grade in ~96. That was one of my earlier "programming" experiences and I spent a lot of time making a shooter called teddy bear doom for our class. However, the next year I found vb and found it a lot more flexible (I also decided I was a pc about that time) The author makes an interesting point re: computers as bicycle vs train, that nothing like HyperCard exists today and apple now has a clear and hard separation between laying track and riding on it. I agree, but I wonder if HyperCard (or a modern version) makes the same mistake many wysiwyg solutions make: if you do something enough, you'll want more capable tools, and if you're a casual hobbyist, the wysiwyg solution will be too complicated anyway, with a disjointed interaction metaphor to boot. If I were a 5th grader today, I think I'd be better served by starting with python than something like hypercard.
ebbv 15y ago
If the author loves HyperCard so much why doesn't he re-create it? Honestly, it would not take that long. The answer is because he'd rather write some link bait trashing Apple and Steve Jobs. And because he knows perfectly well that making HyperCard is not worth his time. IMHO his calculator example makes it perfectly obvious why HyperCard not only was killed but deserved to die. Like all of Apple's languages of the time, HyperTalk is awful. Additionally HyperCard is not particularly flexible or elegant, nor does it produce particularly fantastic end results. It's crap. And in a day like today where we have the web enabling people who have never even heard of a pointer (let alone had to deal with pointer math) to write full fledged, performant, distributed, multi-user applications, why does anyone in their right mind spend 5 minute bemoaning the loss of HyperCard? It's absurdity.
joshwa 15y ago
Still surprised that nobody's made the connection to FileMaker. FileMaker actually predates Hypercard (depending how you define it), and is similar to the point where you can still find Hypercard->FileMaker conversion tools. Filemaker is also screens + controls + simple scripting language (albeit not quite as easy to grasp as HyperTalk/Applescript), and is wildly popular for an audience similar to that of Hypercard users.

184 points by uros643 15y ago

Actually has a really good example (a calculator) to show how HyperCard could be used. HyperCard was a big part of my junior high years. It could even be extended, e.g. there was one add-on that allowed color graphics to be displayed and I learned to make some simple games that way.

jodrellblank 15y ago
But its not a good example. You're sitting at a device with a numeric keypad, and a 9" screen; Replicating the calculator interface in clickable buttons, with a textbox as simulated LCD is a horrible misuse of the potential of a computing environment. A screen, a keyboard and a hardware ALU. Being used to run an OS which draws some keys and a screen, interprets mouse movements, parses and interprets Applescript and parses text arithmetic operations, so it can pretend to be some keys and a screen connected to a hardware ALU. And this is hailed by our "anti-bloat" author as a great example of simplicity which normal people love, and its limits are fine, compared to any other system - e.g. Visual Basic 3 - which is needlessly complex. It's almost funny, until you read his seven tenets of computing and find that any program which encounters any error should enter a debugger, so you can fix it and carry on. I think that would drive anyone insane.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  I don't think the calculator was intended as an example of a great program, or of the "potential of a computing environment". I think it was intended to be a very straightforward example of something that anybody could make as a practice project in HyperCard. If you're new to programming, "make a calculator" is a great project. It involves simple math -- which you probably already understand -- simple operations, and simple concepts. It also illustrates some of HyperCard's strengths. I can't think of any other development environment in which "make a calculator" would be a suitable project for the end of the first week of a programming class. And, in the end, the programmer gets something that they can look at and interact with, and which can be easily extended. ("OK, now make it do factorials!") > It's almost funny, until you read his seven tenets of computing and find that any program which encounters any error should enter a debugger, so you can fix it and carry on. I think that would drive anyone insane. I wish it worked that way! Yes, if programs were constantly crashing into debuggers, it would drive people nuts. Absolutely, no argument there. But, I would hope that that alone would motivate programmers to make them crash less. What we have instead are mysterious black boxes, and I hate that. But, I'm on the end-user support side of things. Here, let me give you some examples of stuff we've dealt with in our little shop in just the last few days: 1. An iMac that hates booting. Sometimes it boots, sometimes it won't. We invoke "verbose" mood, we get some sort of helpful text, and then it all goes away to a black screen. Or, it decides, "OK, all done with verbose mode!", switches to a gray screen, and hangs. Or, we attempt an install from any of our sets of install DVDs, and the most helpful error message we can dig out of any log anywhere is, "i/o error in dvd-rom" (or something similar). It is literally impossible for us to pinpoint the source of the hardware trouble without shotgun replacing every one of the major components in the machine. 2. A FreeBSD system that occasionally does a hard hang. No error log, anywhere. At all. Just halts. Hardware problem? Software problem? 3. An Acer Aspire One with all kinds of really unhelpful error messages in the system logs. Everything seems to be glitching everywhere. Ah, but Windows 7 helpfully generated a mini-dump file of just one of the crashes. Maybe we can track down a bad driver? Let's see, we'll just find and install dumpchk.exe and ... hmm, need to fix debugger symbols for this and ... wait, there's no stack trace? ... uhm ... oh look, it has a "probable cause" at the bottom: "hardware". That's helpful? I know I'm forgetting some. Anyway, it's like this for us all the time. I used to know & love MacsBug. Even with the old MacOS programmer's switch, I could occasionally figure out something useful. I would love it if, instead of calls like, "my computer is stuck at a black screen, should I reboot?", we'd get calls like, "my computer just went to this black screen that says null pointer exception at a bunch of numbers in iaStor.sys". And, even better, if we were so inclined, we could notify software vendors of the specific errors we ran across, so we could do a better job of helping them track down bugs.
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    It also illustrates some of HyperCard's strengths. I can't think of any other development environment in which "make a calculator" would be a suitable project for the end of the first week of a programming class. Visual Basic 3? What we have instead are mysterious black boxes, and I hate that. But, I'm on the end-user support side of things. Here, let me give you some examples of stuff we've dealt with in our little shop in just the last few days: I don't need examples - I wrote my comment on a phone, and twice it popped up Input system error. The system is being restarted, which, it seems, is a spell-check problem. And that's a system which does me more annoyance than good even when it's working normally. We have a firewall with a subsystem which crashes when enabled, and the manufacturer says it's a known problem with no estimated fix time, the only option is to disable that feature - one of their main selling points of the device. A web server, showing problematic memory use and no process using it. GVim on Windows 7 x64 - I could (not sure if I can remember what it was now) repeatedly make it hang, not just itself but also the entire OS, with an operation on a large file which is instant on Linux. Yet Task manager shows no high CPU or memory or disk use. Anyway, it's like this for us all the time. Yes, but it's a fallacy to think I could practically do anything about it if only it wasn't so black box like. Do you really have time and motivation to become expert enough in all the things you deal with that you could fix any problem if only it was more explorable? You may as well ask a restaurant if you can watch the staff cook all your food over their shoulders so you can intercept and change things if you think it's going in a direction you don't want. Even if you are able to taste too much sugar in an Apple Pie, it doesn't follow that you could remove the sugar if only you were in the kitchen watching how much was put in (it's dissolved by then), and it doesn't follow that you could tell if too much was put in just by looking - it depends on how sweet the apples are, and whether the sweetness changes with length of baking. See also: the idea of systemantics. And what am I going to do when it's your webserver crashing, or your iCloud server, or DropBox, or if it's my car navigation system or my phone's spell checker? But, I would hope that that alone would motivate programmers to make them crash less. Programmers don't make software that crashes for fun, you know. If it took no effort, they would make programs which don't crash right now. But it does take effort, and that's a limited resource which needs to be traded off.
    - 15y ago
- sambeau 15y ago
  Have you never watched a video on your PC depute owning a perfectly serviceable TV?
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    Yes. I have also loaded up an OS and browser built on a cross-platform GUI framework and a TCP-IP stack, and used it to do a DNS lookup and send a HTTP compliant request across a tangle of hundreds of miles of interconnected systems to Google's servers to statistically analyse my query, run it through around 700 servers, through an index of several billion web pages, and thousands of years of Youtube videos, millions of pictures, hundreds of thousands of news articles and twitter streams, ranking the results, and at the top putting the results of my calculation "2+1" or whatever. But then, I'm not the author with the weirdo view of 'simple'. What's your point?
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  > It's almost funny, until you read his seven tenets of computing and find that any program which encounters any error should enter a debugger, so you can fix it and carry on. I think that would drive anyone insane. You prefer inexplicable crashes? Now these are enough to drive someone mad. And if you do prefer them, wire your debugger to a Blue Screen of Death emulation.

shib71 15y ago

Visual Basic played a similar role for me many years ago. I've moved on since, but at the time it was exactly what I needed. The value of a WYSIWYG GUI editor and a simple event system to a budding developer can't be overstated.

Yhippa 15y ago

FTA: "And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then read this post again." I always hope in the back of my mind that someday there will be a way to create a web interface as easily as you could in Hypercard. I miss it so much.

asciilifeform 15y ago
No such luck. The Web architecture inherently sucks: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/internet-haters http://philip.greenspun.com/research/internet-haters
- groby_b 15y ago
  Take that article with a large grain of salt. Much of it has been proven wrong by now. ("HTML is where the Web starts and probably where it will end.")
  - irrumator 15y ago
    Take anything from loper-os with a massive grain of salt, he is a long-term troll who has been writing these sorts of wistful but ultimately empty posts for several years now. Calling everything and everyone stupid and bloated and yearning for the good old days is his thing. I only mention this because some HN readers might not be fully aware of his history.
    - asciilifeform 15y ago
      The distinction between a "troll" and an actual human with unpopular opinions is lost on you? You aren't the only one: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91
    - eropple 15y ago
      I don't think loper-os is a troll. I think there are some fundamental social deficiencies at play (the profoundly arrogant and strange README in his SVN trunk is a must-see), but I believe he genuinely means what he says.

iradik 15y ago

I think it'd be interesting to re-write HyperCard in javascript and HTML5, as a way to get kids interested in coding (and maybe use javascript instead of apple script as the card language?). Not sure how difficult this would be as I've never actually used it, only heard of it's majesty and wonder. Cool that you can still run it on an emulator. I'll have to try it out.

siglesias 15y ago

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? I fail to see his point. Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler, and that's part of the reason you have so many amateur apps on the App Store. Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are talking about a company that was 90 days from bankruptcy when he took over. I think he made a good decision. If somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard for the Mac, what in the last 13 years has stopped them? It wasn't Jobs.

asciilifeform 15y ago
> Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler... "Simple" and "pleasant" are different things. Digging a trench deep enough to bury a car is "simple." > Has this guy played with Interface Builder lately? Yes, actually I have played with it. It makes me want to vomit. The whole NextStep stack does, in fact. Because I have used OpenGenera. And HyperCard. > if somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard, what in the last 13 years has stopped them? Here's a example from an unrelated field. The Kalashnikov rifle is more than half a century old. Why has nothing replaced it as the world's most popular weapon of war? Often, complexity and full-featuredness is precisely what people don't want.
- groby_b 15y ago
  Broken example - the Kalashnikov is still very much available, while HyperCard is at best a historical curiosity. And it _has_ been upgraded to the AK74, which means it's a quarter century. It also has been transformed into the Type 56, the SG550 or the Galil. Where is that progress with regards to HyperCard?
  - asciilifeform 15y ago
    Mikhail Kalashnikov did not regard the 74 as an improvement. The project was moved forward against his objections. And HyperCard did indeed end up reincarnated as cheap imitations, just like the Chinese Type 56. The analogy holds. Can't comment on the other two -- small arms aren't really my field.

groby_b 15y ago

Sigh. Maybe instead of ranting at your "typical software engineer", the author should spend a moment to consider that maybe it "could be built again" - but it never has. So the question then turns to, why has it never been built? Is it maybe because Hypercard (and other visual systems) become entirely unmaintainable once we get to large-scale systems? And maybe it is because most people don't want a trivialized programming environment? They either want a full system, or just a product?

dahjelle 15y ago
> They either want a full system, or just a product. While I think this is true at the moment, it seems that there is an interesting question behind that, as well. Why don't more people want to create their own software? I do think the author has an implicit point: because, frankly, creating software stinks. Jon Skeet's talk [1] demonstrates this admirably. I spend a shockingly large part of my time working around bugs and leaky abstractions in other software rather than implementing my own ideas. I don't know if it is possible to design a system with a solid enough abstraction that these problems don't exist. I do know that HyperCard came unusually close, as I know several folks who made HyperCard stacks who wouldn't imagine creating software in any typical fashion. I hold out hope that such a useful system could be created again, one that gives people enough flexibility to create software solutions of their own (perhaps within a genre of software) and that is able to combat the currently-accurate stigma of programming being "hard". [1] http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-ponies-aka-humanity-epic-fail.aspx http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-pon...
- WiseWeasel 15y ago
  Lego Mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/ http://mindstorms.lego.com/) is kind of like Hypercard for the modern age. It's got interesting applications (robotics and automation), and an easy-to-learn programming environment. I'd say it's the perfect product for a budding geek to cut her teeth on.
- groby_b 15y ago
  Hm. I've never seen a HyperCard project that was both maintainable and of a large-ish size. I think _that_ is where the HyperCard idea broke down - navigating through a bunch of cards is significantly more difficult than through a bunch of text files. Granted, that _may_ be a question of the tools. But I do find it telling that in the long time since the "death" of HyperCard nobody could come up with compelling tools. And creating software is hard because ultimately, it requires analytical thinking. Which, by itself, is hard. Yes, the choice of tool modulates the hardness of the problem - but the underlying issues are still hard. (Note: I do not claim non-programmers _can't_ reason analytically. I claim the effort/result ratio is not right for them) It's the same reason most people buy furniture instead of building it. Acquiring the necessary skill set is simply too much effort for the result.

jawngee 15y ago

Umm, SuperCard still exists and is under active development. Even back in the day it was superior to HyperCard in every way. My guess was that HyperCard was killed because the WWW was coming. I used SuperCard pretty heavily back in '92ish at the second college in Minnesota to get the internet (MCAD - U of M was first). I remember the rows of NeXT boxes they had, the only machines connected and I remember fumbling around with building Gopher sites as well as some basic HTML hacking, as basic as it was back then. I lost interest in HyperCard/SuperCard shortly thereafter. But it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. I don't know that this guy had exposure to any of this hence the short sightedness and, in my opinion, miscalculation of Job's motives.

asciilifeform 15y ago
> the WWW was coming. In 1998? > it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. I have used all of these, and beg to differ. The spirit of HyperCard was that of radical simplicity, and it does not live in these systems.
- jawngee 15y ago
  > > the WWW was coming. > In 1998? I built my first HTML page in '93. NCSA Mosaic was the rage in the lab. > > it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, > > Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things. > > I have used all of these, and beg to differ. The spirit of > HyperCard was that of radical simplicity, and it does not > live in these systems. ??? Drag and drop, double click to add script, how is that not the spirit of HyperCard? HyperCard was the preeminent RAD development tool. Easier than Visual Basic? Sure, but not by much. The gap between BASIC and HyperTalk is not that great a leap. If you can't see the parallels between Macromedia Director and HyperCard, you're being blinded by your own weird sense of what's what - considering they both used the same basic language back then.
  - asciilifeform 15y ago
    Hypercard is different from systems like Director in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.

ezy 15y ago

This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Hypercard was the BASIC of the Macintosh in that it served the same niche. It certainly was not BASIC, but the idea was the same, a little language and environment that fit into the machine's environment that allowed novices (and then highly practiced novices :-)) to create stuff on the machine for other people to use. It was killed for the same reason BASIC, in the sense of built-in 8bit micro BASIC, kind of fell to the wayside except as a way to stitch existing apps together. No one is really impressed by a calculator program anymore. Matching the capabilities of modern software is hard nowadays. It's demotivating to create a calculator program... that's it? Hypercard really can't match even JS, et al. in functionality. I remember when it started to happen in the 16bit era. Software was already starting to get too good and too complex for a simple tool. I got an Amiga. The Amiga had a built-in BASIC -- but no one used it. Why? Because there was no fucking way you were going to recreate even the bouncing ball demo in BASIC. It wasn't going to happen. Essentially, anything you created was going to be a huge disappointment with that tool. This was not necessarily true in the 8bit days -- but from 16bit on, you either learned assembly/C or gave up. People can learn in that environment (and did), but the barrier was much higher. Lowering that barrier while coming close to the capability of "real" software is a hard problem. Fortunately, it's coming full circle. Now that machines are powerful enough that "real" software is being written in interpreters, JS seems like it actually is the new BASIC. I'm not totally sold on that -- because the stack is too too baroque (although, again, people do learn in that environment). Processing is perilously close but not quite there because it's so domain specific. Python comes with a lot, but doesn't fit into native environments very well. If I had to chose, I'd say it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack in the same way 8bit BASIC sat over the primitive OS at the time.

asciilifeform 15y ago
> This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Tell that to the thousands of otherwise non-programming people who developed real, useful applications (some of them best-selling) in Hypercard. > it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack Like building a castle on a swamp. Foundations matter: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55

ricardobeat 15y ago

He's kind of pissed off. I see nothing special with it except for the "natural" language.

asciilifeform 15y ago
The "natural" language is actually the weakest part.
- Luyt 15y ago
  Because it really isn't natural at all, it only looks natural. AppleScript is a kind of COBOL. You have to know exactly what (natural-sounding) keywords and clauses you can use. Try some real natural language and the interpreter is suddenly lost.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
Y'know, I can see where he's coming from. I'll get to that in a moment, but first: I'm starting to get a little sick of HN's tone lately. I'll readily admit that I've contributed to that in the past, but some of the comments in this thread ("person is a troll", "writes vacuous posts", "is a crackpot") are really over the top asinine. He's a better person than I am, because if it were me, I'd already have a script in place that checked the referrer and would post a blank page with "Eat a dick" for anybody coming from HN. If nothing else, it would ensure that the submission wouldn't get as many upvotes (or would get flagged) and I wouldn't feel compelled to put up with the abuse. Anyway: So, IIRC, my progression as a young programmer went something like: BASIC on a Commodore 64 / Vic-20, to Logo on I-don't-remember, to HyperCard (and then on to QBasic and Pascal and C and C++ and OOP and on and on). HyperCard was amazing because its barrier-to-entry was so, so low, and I agree with the author's comments that there still isn't anything quite like it. For one thing, it was on most Macs by default at the time, so you didn't have to find a copy of the software and install it first. As he shows, it was a piece of cake to get started with. A budding HyperCard programmer could easily learn new tricks by downloading anybody's stack and reading the code. Since it wasn't compiled, you could learn from it. Anything that anybody else did, you could take apart, and learn how to do. And it grew with you. You could make something as simple or as complex as you wanted. My very first, very naive foray into AI was in HyperTalk; I discovered I could write self-modifying stacks, and decided to see if I could teach a HyperTalk stack to talk to me like a person. HyperCard also introduced me to online forums for the first time. I still remember, fondly, downloading J5iverson's XFCNs from eWorld. From there, I discovered the world of the early internet -- the alternative to BBSs. Whereas BBSs at the time let me easily chat with someone else in my town (or, more often, play TradeWars or something), eWorld let me chat with people "across the pond" for the first time. For a young kid, this was a life-changing, world-shrinking event. I disagree with the comments that SuperCard is a reasonable alternative. I don't remember the details now, but while I appreciated the addition of color in SuperCard, it brought with it other complexities that I disliked. I played around with SuperCard but ultimately went back to HyperCard. So, what I'm getting at is, if it weren't for HyperCard, I don't think I'd be a programmer right now. HyperCard was simple enough for a beginner, and rich enough to keep my interest. It was a huge influence on me. I really can't overstate that. Almost two decades later, I was approached by an employer who wanted me to teach computer programming to his son. His son was young, not yet in high school, pretty sharp, and, y'know, geeky. Liked video games, liked taking things apart. Not exactly a challenging pupil in terms of motivation. I spent a ton of time trying to figure out just what in the hell environment to use to teach him. JavaScript? You have to know a lot of other stuff before you can really begin to do anything of value in JavaScript. Before we could do the calculator example in the author's blog post in JavaScript, I'd have to teach basics of HTML, the DOM, and eventually we'd either end up using JQuery or going over the whole "browsers are different in how they handle the same code" discussion, which, honestly, is one of the most stupid problems in the history of computing when you think about it. Anyway, I went through a bunch of options and finally settled on something called Kids Programming Language (or Phrogram). What a damned mess that was. It wasn't very long before I had to teach the concept of objects to the kid. And scope. And then half the time the entire environment would just up and crash with no helpful explanation. There's a fun problem for a newbie programmer: write some code, your environment crashes, no explanation. If the field has improved much since then, I'm unaware of it. Not having something like HyperCard available to young programmers really is a tragedy, because it means that future programmers are going to be introduced to programming in college (which, often, is a joke, and IMO also too late in an individual's mental development), or they're going to have to tough it out through JavaScript or Ruby or Python or whatever the inscrutable popular language-of-the-month is, and that's going to really narrow down the field of people interested in getting into programming. Some free market adherents might respond with, "Well, if there was demand, someone would build it, so obviously there's no demand". Honestly, I find that entire argument completely boring. It's clear that there was a lot of demand for it; did nobody want it before it was invented, and has nobody wanted it since it became no longer supported? I don't think so. I think there is a market for such a thing, and it just hasn't been built yet. I really hope it will be. It's already on my list of near-future projects if nobody else does it first.

boopboop 15y ago

Filemaker is similar to Hypercard.. http://www.filemaker.com/ http://www.filemaker.com/

asciilifeform 15y ago
Quite a few things are detectably similar to Hypercard. Even MS Visual Studio. None of them have the love-at-first-sight appeal. Most seem like an unbearable ordeal once you've used the real thing.
derefr 15y ago
You know what's actually the product I've met with the most similarity to HyperCard? Microsoft PowerPoint. You have cards, buttons that can navigate between them in arbitrary ways, effects that can trigger on loading or unloading a card, etc. And for everything else, you have VBA, which, like AppleScript, allows buttons and fields to do arbitrary things (with generic COM objects, even!) I once wrote a full-scale Dragon-Quest-style CRPG in PowerPoint, using the cards as a scene graph; it was actually quite friendly.
- mutagen 15y ago
  There's some truth to this (as appalling as the notion is). While I'm teaching Python to my 7th grade nephew his school is having him 'program' in Powerpoint. As dismissive as I am of the notion, it does allow students to quickly get some stuff up on the screen and start being interactive. Fortunately my nephew has taken to Python and is even starting to become a language snob "That looks like a stupid way to program".
  - derefr 15y ago
    Hmm... putting PowerPoint and Python side-by-side reminds me a little of Shoes (http://shoesrb.com/ http://shoesrb.com/), which is also something that "allow[s] students to quickly get some stuff up on the screen and start being interactive", but is purely code-based, rather than having any sort of GUI interface construction tool.

toddmorey 15y ago

A bit of trivia: MYST, the CD-ROM game, was first shipped for the Mac and written entirely in HyperCard (with a few custom extensions to load the color graphics as quickly as possible).

gcanyon 15y ago

The code for this could have simpler/less verbose. It's been a while, but I believe in the number buttons this would have worked: put the short name of me after fld "lcd" and in the equals sign button: put the value of fld "lcd" into fld "lcd" (edited to fix a missing quote)

asciilifeform 15y ago
Thanks! Also there is an extra eval (the first one is unnecessary, I think.) But I am too lazy to revise the screenshots.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

resnamen 15y ago

HyperCard is very near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid I taught myself how to program with Hypercard. I'm a software developer today, and despite the crazy verbose syntax of HyperTalk, I still acquired an intuition for programming that remains helpful, 15 years later. I actually approached Steve Jobs about the demise of Hypercard in 1998, when I was 15, at the Seybold SF conference. IIRC he gave a pretty dismissive response about it, basically saying that there wouldn't be a market for it anymore. It was pretty obvious that he didn't care about HyperCard or HyperCard-like products anymore. That, or he didn't want punk teenagers questioning his business strategy. As a side note, I got my photo taken with him. When the photo was developed I saw that I was wearing a megawatt smile (shit, I met with Steve Jobs!), and Steve was looking distractedly at something in the corner.

resnamen 15y ago

I think HyperCard was special in that other people's stacks were easy to come by, and easy to disassemble. There was no compiled distributable form, all stacks could be cracked open if you wanted to see how they ticked, and just modified just as easily if you wanted to see how the program's behavior would change.

evolve2k 15y ago

I remember making a game with hyper card when I was at school and loved that I could visually script the buttons. We hand drew pictures of 3D rooms and then scanned them in and put big invisible buttons over the doors etc. I personally think the www killed hyper card, suddenly you could do very similar things but have them instantly shared globally. In my mind hypercards real innovation was creating your own links which would take you to any other card you desired, I think plain old simple HTML came along and killed the poor thing. HyperCard lived in a time of share it on a disc and I imagine Jobs seeing it's days as numbered.

dahjelle 15y ago
Bill Atkinson, the creator of Hypercard, is on record [1] wishing he'd had the foresight to extend the links to the network. Hypercard was inches away from being the first "web browser". [1] http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/08/54370 http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/0...

pnathan 15y ago

The author makes a very valid point: the modern Way of personal computing is about the controlled user experience; allowing people to get their mess all over with their own work would disrupt that Way. Don't appreciate the crack about the 'aspie software engineer' though. Definitely not needed.

edtechdev 15y ago

I was sad to see Hypercard abandoned - I learned how to program with it myself (along with Perl & CGI apps - syntax didn't matter so much as what you could accomplish with it). But part of the reason I think is that Steve Jobs abandoned going primarily after the education market when he returned to Apple - he had already been burned by it (or become disillusioned by it) at Next, but also really Apple had already saturated the education market. He and Apple focused on the consumer market (imacs, ipods, etc.) - the business market had already been won by Microsoft. Microsoft also already had a more successful end-user friendly programming/scripting environment: Visual Basic and VBA. In case some don't know, Visual Basic was the most popular programming language in the world until overtaken by Java. VB didn't really start to significantly decline until more people developing business apps switched to C# and other languages. Microsoft also won with a more popular tool for creating visual 'stacks' or presentations: Powerpoint. Most educators were basically using hypercard/supercard/hyperstudio to create presentations - and Powerpoint made it easier to do so. Hypercard (and hypertalk) isn't dead though. Applescript is still around (despite Apple also trying to kill it). LiveCode and other options are still around and being updated for HTML5 & mobile platforms, as is Visual Basic, too (nsbasic). A java port of the hypertalk language is here: http://code.google.com/p/openxion/ http://code.google.com/p/openxion/ Natural language-like interfaces aren't dead, either. Look at testing tools like Cucumber, the google search engine, Siri, and so forth. Look at all the DSLs out there that try to make Ruby/Javascript/etc. more like natural languages, at least in certain contexts.

SimHacker 15y ago

Does anyone remember publishing HyperCard stacks on the web with the WebStar mac web server? That was pretty cool! It even translated the controls and fields on the stack to html forms that worked in the web browser. http://143.50.28.215/HyperCGI.html http://143.50.28.215/HyperCGI.html

commieneko 15y ago

Hypercard was a wonder. I used to teach street people how to make simple, useful applications that they thought of themselves. Sure it was limited in what it did, and that was part of its beauty. It was a tool for quickly hacking together a simple application. A tool that nearly anyone could learn to use quickly. And it was fun and spontaneous. And the Hypertalk language was very interesting to work in. It was like a limited dialect of a spoken language; a pidgin for computers.

jrmg 15y ago

I think much more likely explanations than the nefarious anti-creative one given for HyperCard's death are that, to varying degrees: Steve found all HyperCard stacks he saw to be messy and confusing, not at all the functional simplicity he was looking for; HyperCard was taking engineering resources and/or money that could be better spent saving the Mac, and therefore Apple. Apple has not, in recent years, on the Mac, been against trying to provide simpler programming environments - look at Automator, (the now also defunct?) AppleScript Studio, or Dashcode.

david927 15y ago
Simple programming environments have a fundamental flaw: they fool you. Let's say we have a type of perforated balsa wood that you can just snap into pieces and glue in place. Making a dog house just went from hours to minutes! Hurrah! So you start telling everyone that this is the new way to construct buildings, but then as you get bigger structures, it starts to fall apart. Simple programming environments fool you into thinking you into thinking your projects can scale, and the result is a mess. Hypercard was fun, but it wasn't a deep paradigm, it wasn't good syntax, and in the end, I have to say that it was good that it died.
- arethuza 15y ago
  "Simple programming environments fool you into thinking you into thinking your projects can scale, and the result is a mess." Doesn't seem to have stopped Excel in particular, and spreadsheets in general, from being wildly succesful.
  - david927 15y ago
    Very good point. I think spreadsheets are just deep enough and map well enough to the domains that use them, that it can tread water. (Not swim, mind you.) They're also quite clear about their constraints.
    - arethuza 15y ago

almost 15y ago

Wow, that brings back some happy memories. Writing Eliza style chat bots on my Mac SE in Hypercard was a lot of fun :) Fun fact: the best selling game Myst was developed in Hypercard!

abecedarius 15y ago

Alan Kay's STEPS project drew some inspiration from Hypercard. I haven't gotten to try it, alas. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

phodo 15y ago

I recently discovered Quartz Composer, which is included on any Mac w/ Xcode, and I was pretty impressed by its capability. IMHO it is one of the best kept secrets of the apple-verse. While it is very different from Hypercard, it certainly provides a level of artistic expression and creative freedom that the article alludes is present in Hypercard. When I booted up QC for the first time a few months ago, I was blown away by its awesomeness. And then when I further explored the vibrant community out there AND the fact that it can be readily integrated into objective-c / cocoa, it's clear that Apple is very much in tune with what normal people and creative people need to express themselves on a computer. To get started, here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer and http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/graphics-and-animation.html http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/graphics-and-ani... Hint: If you have Xcode installed, simply type "quartz composer" into spotlight and begin your journey. A final note: I seem to recall but not certain that a) QC was an acquisition by Apple of a french company; and b) the original developer has moved on from Apple

nicpottier 15y ago

The thing I've always felt held back these paradigms is something that is inherent in them, they are too visual. That sounds crazy, but just look at this article and how he described what he did. He had to take a million screenshots to show it. The same is true for say, the Android app builder, or the Lego logic thing.. the way you sure code is via a screenshot. And that just doesn't scale very well I don't think. It makes copy/pasting, the most basic way that people learn, really difficult. HTML5 is pretty awesome, or rather WOULD be pretty awesome if we could erase the last 15 years and all start with CSS3 compliant browsers. But it is such a mess now that I feel bad for anybody starting from scratch. But the combination of HTML for layout and Javascript for layout is pretty darn powerful, and I think pretty accessible as well. You could certainly build something on the order of the simplicity of Hypercard on that stack. But I do like the author's comments about the shame that there are far fewer 'programmers' than back in the old days. BASIC on the AppleII is of course the other example (among others).. where it was just so easy and almost natural for ANY user to start getting a feel for things and hacking around. Losing that really IS a shame.

swdunlop 15y ago

There's no mystery, here. No great conspiracy -- the article has a screenshot of the smoking gun. http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/hypercard-calc/hc12.jpg http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/hypercard-calc/hc12.jpg The scripting language had a verbosity and ambiguity that only a lawyer could love. The documentation for that language was similarly impenetrable to anyone with a background in CS, requiring a serious commitment to trial and error to perform operations that were trivial in BASIC.

sambeau 15y ago
That is total conjecture and is not historically accurate. Hypercard was ridiculously popular and widely used amongst people who wouldn't ordinarily program (lawyers, historians, graphic designers etc). Hypercard was not aimed at CS graduates but even when if it was it comes from a time long before CS courses taught Java (And in many cases even C). This kind of verbose, human-readable scripting was exactly the sort of thing that a CS graduate would have experimented with along side the more traditional Pascal and Lisp.
Someone 15y ago
It looks that way, but it is not that verbose. Compare: get name of me put the value of the last word of it after card field "lcd" with it = event.target.name currentCard.fields["lcd"].append(it.text.asWords().last()) It looks verbose, and in some sense it is, but having lots of implicit state made it a nice environment for what it was.

timinman 15y ago

I loved Hypercard and BASIC too, but this post strikes me as being a little affected by nostalgia. With Hypercard you could make something for someone who 1) has an Apple, 2) Has Hypercard installed, and 3) Has the right version of Hypercard installed. With HTML/CSS/Javascript you can make something to run almost anywhere. It's not 'easy' but it is useful.

asciilifeform 15y ago
> With HTML/CSS/Javascript you can make something to run almost anywhere. With gargantuan effort. And your creation will still appear distorted in unpredictable ways to many users.

SimHacker 15y ago

Who remembers the HyperCard Smut Stack? http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/HyperCard/message/28096 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/HyperCard/message/2809...

timinman 15y ago

Don't forget, there's Hackety Hack http://hackety-hack.com/ http://hackety-hack.com/ and Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://scratch.mit.edu/, two great tools for new programmers to get their feet wet and make something fun in the process!

Someone 15y ago

I think what killed Hypercard, in some sense, was what it made popular: like the Amiga, it was too closely tied to its hardware. HyperCard ran black and white windows of 512*342 pixels because that is what the original Mac had (there was a version that did some color things, but that was and felt like a serious bolt-on job). Moreover, all graphics where bitmaps. Bringing that into the 'real world' as it existed at the end of the eighties would have taken a lot of resources, and it was not guaranteed that the end result would still be HyperCard. For example, if one allowed resizable windows, laymen would have to learn about layout algorithms ('is this button 50 pixels wide, or a quarter screen wide? Is it 20 pixels from the bottom, 10% of screen height, or should its bottom border match that of that text field over there?'). Also, at the time, there were attempts to include some Hypercard/Director-like features to QuickTime. HyperCard was considered for that functionality, but did not make the cut.

ayuvar 15y ago
I think that versions of Hypercard past v1.0 allowed for stacks of arbitrary window size; I know for a fact that I made up at least a few 1024x768 ones in v2.2. You are correct in that I don't think it supported resizable windows without the use of some XCMD though.
- Someone 15y ago
  You are correct. Surprisingly, I even found evidence for that: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA31048 http://support.apple.com/kb/TA31048: * All the cards in a given stack must be the same size, even if there are several different backgrounds in the stack. * Smallest card size: 64 x 64 pixels * Largest card size: 1280 x 1280 pixels.

RexRollman 15y ago

Hypercard was very interesting to me, enough so that I bought my first programming book, Danny Goodman's The Complete Hypercard Handbook. I loved tinkering about with Hypercard on my very first computer, a Powerbook 100 that I bought new in 1992. I was sad when Apple decided to only include Hypercard Player with new Macs, which I also think ultimately helped contribute to its death. People liked Hypercard but not enough to pay money for it. By the time Steve killed it, it was a lumbering zombie of its former self.

dahjelle 15y ago

I had a sudden hypothesis after reading this thread last night. (No proof, mind you, just an idea.) I wonder if HyperCard's success was for the same reason as UNIX's success: a well-chosen, small set of interoperable tools that allowed the user to do far more than the sum of their parts. And, as computing and interfaces have become more complex, we've just tacked on complexity to them rather than reinventing them to adapt. For instance, UNIX's treatment of everything as a file is a great tool, but I think there was a time where that simplified a much greater percentage of computing than it would today. Similarly, I suspect HyperCard died because the abstractions it was using had to be reimagined to stay competitive. Spreadsheets (as mentioned elsewhere) are an example of a product that has managed to stay focused on the simple set of tools, and, when features were tacked on, they often stay out of the way instead of adding complexity to day-to-day operations. However, I'm not sure they've aged well, but I guess they are the best we have at the moment.

bad_user 15y ago
IMHO, the Linux programming environment is a mess precisely because not everything is a file handler - not even sockets, as even though sockets can behave like files, there are differences. Plan9 was supposed to be the reinvention of Unix and a lot of useful stuff was ported from Plan9 to modern-day Linux, including the /proc filesystem which is really, really useful. Unfortunately the UNIX philosophy is so powerful that you don't understand it until you live and breathe UNIX. And it also doesn't scale for some use-cases, but this philosophy is the reason why UNIX is not only alive, but the dominant platform. Also, HyperCard is NOT a "small set of interoperable tools". And neither is Excel.
- dahjelle 15y ago
  Though I haven't done any Linux programming, I can definitely see your point. A abstraction seems only as useful as it is consistent. You're right: HyperCard and Excel aren't a small set of interoperable tools like UNIX is. I would argue, though, that they are close: a walled garden of interoperable tools. Rather than guide you through steps to a specific end (the extreme example is a wizard for, say, a mail merge), they present you with tools you can use to get to that end. Obviously, they don't work particularly well outside their garden, and the great advantage of adding tools to your toolset is cumbersome at best. I do wish I understood the UNIX philosophy better. Perhaps I'll learn more over time.

soapdog 15y ago

HyperCard like systems are not dead. I make my living from LiveCode ( http://www.runrev.com http://www.runrev.com ) which is a xTalk system that is able to build applications for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. From a single HyperCard-like environment, I can build apps for all these platforms and reuse the code. LiveCode is very verbose and it may take a while for those that are already familiar with C-like languages but it is worth it. Software is easy to maintain and there is little space for confusion, even with few comments. RunRev company also release a PHP-like engine, so I can create web applications that communicate with native clients on mobile and desktop all from a single language and environment, this is very powerful. You should always use the best tool for your job. For my job, LiveCode fits perfectly. I also think that xTalk languages are a wonderful introduction to programming and people from non-technical backgrounds can learn it easily and start creating little tools to help their specific domains. Yes, anyone can learn programming in any language, it is just a matter of effort, I believe LiveCode makes this effort fun and productive. You may read this as advertisement but this is my personal opinion. I am 31 and have been using LiveCode since I was 25 or something like that. In the meantime I got married, got my own place and am living a good life. All my work is LiveCode related. Just telling you that so you guys don't take me for "someone that toys with this cute language every once in a while but is not serious". Even if you already have your favorite language, it is worth to check out LiveCode, just to learn what else is out there. There are beginner webinars starting next month I think...

soapdog 15y ago
oh... I forgot to tell, LiveCode can import HyperCard stacks... =)

dave_sullivan 15y ago

I remember using hyper studio (later version) in 5th grade in ~96. That was one of my earlier "programming" experiences and I spent a lot of time making a shooter called teddy bear doom for our class. However, the next year I found vb and found it a lot more flexible (I also decided I was a pc about that time) The author makes an interesting point re: computers as bicycle vs train, that nothing like HyperCard exists today and apple now has a clear and hard separation between laying track and riding on it. I agree, but I wonder if HyperCard (or a modern version) makes the same mistake many wysiwyg solutions make: if you do something enough, you'll want more capable tools, and if you're a casual hobbyist, the wysiwyg solution will be too complicated anyway, with a disjointed interaction metaphor to boot. If I were a 5th grader today, I think I'd be better served by starting with python than something like hypercard.

ebbv 15y ago

If the author loves HyperCard so much why doesn't he re-create it? Honestly, it would not take that long. The answer is because he'd rather write some link bait trashing Apple and Steve Jobs. And because he knows perfectly well that making HyperCard is not worth his time. IMHO his calculator example makes it perfectly obvious why HyperCard not only was killed but deserved to die. Like all of Apple's languages of the time, HyperTalk is awful. Additionally HyperCard is not particularly flexible or elegant, nor does it produce particularly fantastic end results. It's crap. And in a day like today where we have the web enabling people who have never even heard of a pointer (let alone had to deal with pointer math) to write full fledged, performant, distributed, multi-user applications, why does anyone in their right mind spend 5 minute bemoaning the loss of HyperCard? It's absurdity.

joshwa 15y ago

Still surprised that nobody's made the connection to FileMaker. FileMaker actually predates Hypercard (depending how you define it), and is similar to the point where you can still find Hypercard->FileMaker conversion tools. Filemaker is also screens + controls + simple scripting language (albeit not quite as easy to grasp as HyperTalk/Applescript), and is wildly popular for an audience similar to that of Hypercard users.