

HyperCard Forgotten, but Not Gone - dmoney
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/08/54365

======
mojuba
A formal language that sounds like

    
    
      Put the first word of the third line of field "hello" into field "goodbye"
    

(which is actually goodbye = hello.lines[3].words[1]) is ridiculous. The
HyperCard phenomenon though is something that should be researched by
psychologists, because I myself, too, saw it many times how a complete non-
techie gets something working in an hour or two. They get it quickly and
"amazing" is just not the word. No other programming tool is as good at that
as HyperCard.

And like the rest of the old good Apple stuff HyperCard can be traced back to
Xerox PARC: that's NoteCards, a Lisp-based hyper-text system, according to
Wikipedia.

~~~
bayareaguy
Inform 7 programs read this way: <http://www.inform-
fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html>

This style makes it harder to write but easier for novices to read. It's not
the tradeoff you would want for serious programming - the training wheels get
old fast, but it makes sense if you need or expect lots of novices to read it.

~~~
mojuba
It looks like a descriptive language rather than a Turing-complete programming
language. Or am I wrong?

~~~
bayareaguy
Programming in it is a little like prolog. You declare a bunch of facts and
you declare some pattern rules.

Oh, and there is this cute little story too:
<http://www.math.psu.edu/clemens/IF/Turing/source.html>

------
omnipath
Not trolling, but just asking a serious question. If HyperCard was the bee
knees, why doesn't some make an open source version of it?

~~~
rcoder
Disclaimer: it's been >10 years since I did any HyperCard/HyperTalk
programming, so I will admit that I may mis-state some of the points below.
That being said, HyperCard served as a major training ground for me when I was
getting started programming, and I even went so far as to step through a fair
bit of the obfuscated stack that made up Myst in order to understand how it
had been implemented...

HyperCard suffered from a few obvious problems for larger-scale programming.
First, it lacked any support for meaningful code structure and re-use. You
didn't so much have functions or procedures so much as you had GOTO statements
pointing between cards. For simple logic, that may be fine, but for more
complicated workflow, the 1:1 mapping between cards and code blocks, and lack
of shared state between them, means that non-trivial apps quickly became a
mess of HyperTalk and hackish extensions written in C.

Also, it was tightly tied to a number of MacOS platform technologies; at a
minimum, building a full clone of HyperCard would have required re-
implementing some analogue to QuickDraw, including (IIRC) some undocumented
hooks that the engineers at Apple used into the underlying system.

In the end, though, what probably killed HyperCard more than anything else was
the rise of the web browser. Many of the basic operations of a HyperCard stack
-- linking between discrete pages of data, providing simple interactive
widgets and multimedia, and supporting complex layout of text and images --
are extremely well-supported by graphical web browsers, and the fact that
resources are stored on the network mean that you don't have to pass around
stacks on disk like you did in the HyperCard days.

That being said, there have been periodic efforts to fill the same niche,
without continuing to enforce the more baroque limitations that HyperCard had.
PythonCard _was_ a very interesting project, but seems to be pretty much dead
at this point.

The [Shoes](<http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/>) project seems to be a
good bit more active at this point. It's still at a pretty early stage in
terms of API stability, but _why is one of the more tenacious programmers out
there, and the community that has already sprung up around it is impressive.

------
bobochan
"Before HyperCard, programming was more or less the exclusive domain of
professional programmers."

I loved HyperCard (still have some of the reference books on my shelf in case
it does come back) but a statement like this is way off base. Tens of
thousands of non-professional students and enthusiasts were writing and
sharing BASIC programs long before HyperCard and Turbo Pascal was a huge
sensation at the time.

------
wallflower
My first formal programming class was a summer school (grade-school)
experience using HyperCard so I have a sentimental spot for Hypercard Stacks.
I remember being wow'd by the demos on the Mac SE.

