[HN Gopher] Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
Author : _448
Score : 144 points
Date : 2021-04-09 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.loper-os.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.loper-os.org)
| ksec wrote:
| I have recently bumped into something called Cardstack [1] which
| seems to be something like HyperCard for Web.
|
| I still believe there are so much potential untapped in this
| HyperCard, no-code, or very little code Apps. But it seems it is
| similar to Nuclear Fusion it is always another 5 years away.
|
| [1] https://cardstack.com
| nabla9 wrote:
| >HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the
| distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has
| been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the
| personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an
| expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden
| aesthetic has no place.
| api wrote:
| That world still exists and many of the users of this site live
| in it. I program my computer all the time, from scripts all the
| way up to whole apps and services. I run a company that writes
| software.
|
| What happened is that computing became popular, vastly
| increasing the user base, and the majority of these new users
| didn't want to program any more than the average driver wants
| to work on the engine of their own car. They just wanted a
| computer to be a gadget they could use to do specific things:
| online interaction, spreadsheets, games, word processing, etc.
|
| Is that bad? I don't do anything with my car but drive it (and
| rarely these days!). Am I missing out on the car experience?
|
| Today's hobbyist computer market is _larger_ than it was back
| in the good old days. We have an embarrassment of riches from
| cheap hardware (secondhand laptops that can run Linux are
| virtually free and there are dozens of <$50 Linux SBCs) to
| vast quantities of open source software available on
| aggregators like GitHub. There are vastly more creators than
| ever before. There are just orders of magnitude more passive
| casual users than those.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I really don't think that world does still exist, at least
| not quite in the same way. Even on today's Linux systems,
| there's a huge barrier between using the system and changing
| something about it. I wrote a little bit about this a while
| back: https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html
|
| Suffice to say, I think many more people would make small
| changes that make their lives easier _if_ if were easy and
| straightforward to do so as a user. Right now, it 's not.
| api wrote:
| I think the answer to this part of it is at the bottom of
| that rant: the increase in complexity. The barrier you
| describe exists because there is so much damn complexity in
| modern systems, much of it unnecessary.
| qsort wrote:
| On one hand I'm completely with you that acting like
| programming is "an echo of a different world" is just
| romanticizing a past that never existed, but I can't help but
| feel there is _some_ (and only some) truth to it.
|
| A car is a means of transportation, the fact that you can
| tweak the engine is tangential to its function, a computer is
| useful because, and not in spite, of its universality.
|
| There isn't any logical way of using a computer that isn't
| programming, but ironically, it's often a mere afterthought
| in commercial products. To continue the obligatory car
| analogy, writing complex software in a full development
| environment is the equivalent of tweaking the engine. It's a
| job for professionals and I don't expect the average user to
| be able to do it. But writing a simple script for the system
| interpreter that wires premade components is more like
| changing your oil or changing a tire, it's really baffling
| that most people can't do it.
| dougb5 wrote:
| The Apple IIgs had a port of Hypercard, but as I recall it was
| too slow and buggy, and it got very little traction. I was an
| avid user of a similar tool called HyperStudio. I looked it up
| just now and to my surprise it's still alive -- there's a Mac
| version now under different ownership but with similar features,
| and it's used in classrooms. https://www.hyperstudio.com
| Causality1 wrote:
| I wish hypercard was still around. It seems like an ideal way to
| build flexible reference material, like a full repair and
| maintenance guide for vehicles or equipment where everything
| could link to each other in an intuitive way.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| The walled garden rant is anachronistic. HyperCard died because
| Apple stopped major work it. Circa 1987! There was no HyperCard
| team to put out a new version when Jobs returned in 1997, and a
| dying Apple couldn't justify building one from scratch. It's that
| simple.
|
| (Yes, there were post-1987 updates, none of which added
| fundamental critical features like color support. Which was
| introduced to the Mac lineup with the Mac II, also in 1987.)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| It did get color support though, no? Kind of kludged in (iirc
| you had to manually add Color Tools support to a stack), but
| Myst was famously put together in HyperCard, and that came out
| in 1993.
|
| Edit: Myst apparently used a plug-in (InColor from Heizer
| Software), and 2.3 officially added Color Tools
|
| https://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/how-hypercard-got-its...
| dasil003 wrote:
| You nailed it. There wasn't some machiavellian plan at work,
| it's just that HyperCard was not a killer app, and not
| something that would help a struggling 90s-era Apple. It was
| one of many cool concept apps that came out of the early PC-
| era, and although it personally captured my 10-year-old
| imagination like no other, from a business perspective it never
| achieved the prominence or practicality of your FileMaker Pros
| and Microsoft Accesses.
|
| Also, Steve Jobs wasn't even at Apple for the critical phase of
| HyperCard's life cycle. By the time he returned in 1997 there
| had been no meaningful investment in HyperCard for many years,
| and it's lack of a native networking paradigm meant that even
| if Apple had thrown their weight behind it, it would not have
| been possible to catch up to the web which was already well
| past critical mass at that point.
| Jetrel wrote:
| Yeah, you, also, absolutely nailed it.
|
| By the time they could have mustered any serious effort to
| save it, the web had already won.
| rvense wrote:
| This was my thinking as well.
|
| But actually, looking at Wikipedia, it appears there was work
| on a Hypercard 3.0, which added a bunch of features and turned
| Hypercard stacks into a special kind of Quicktime movie. It was
| demoed as alpha quality and never finished... which sounds
| pretty much exactly like nearly all other Apple products at the
| time! Smart people doing cool stuff with little direction under
| bad management, unable to get the cool stuff out the door. And
| arguably by the return of Jobs, the ship had sailed. There was
| no way Hypercard was going to take over the world after the
| introduction of Windows 95 and WWW, that was clear to anyone. I
| wish it had, though.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I've never seen it in such detail since this was before my
| (Apple) time. On the other hand in the 90s there was a ton of
| point-and-click Rapid Application Development software available
| as Shareware. I used that software since programming with general
| purpose tools was not very accessible because of little free
| documentation, steep learning curves and often costly tools.
| Unfortunately anything more complex than a recursion level of 1
| was usually impossible.
|
| As time passed by I eventually ended up buying Delphi 3, just to
| find out that it was less intuitive than the Delphi 2 Shareware
| that I used excessively until then. Nowadays I even recommend
| non-technical people to take a look at Python when they consider
| writing anything more complex than an Excel formula. I'd be
| surprised if such tools ever become popular again.
|
| > 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. And if you continue to think so, then you
| might
|
| > be an autistic typical software "engineer," and please don't
| waste
|
| > your time commenting here. Sink back into the cube farm hellpit
| from whence you came.
|
| Seems you ultimately need to go ad hominem to argue for this kind
| of software in 20xx.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs
| killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused
| to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| This assumes Jobs was a particularly petty person.
| dboreham wrote:
| Assuming an axiom is ok.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You're right, it's a big assumption that he was a person.
| isomorph wrote:
| I take it you haven't read Small Fry
| minikites wrote:
| Have you read any stories about him? Something like this
| wouldn't even crack the top 10 petty things Steve Jobs did.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Of all the reasons I've read or heard, this one rings true.
| HyperCard at least for Bill was bigger than NeXT or Jobs which
| wont be tolerated. Its mere existence mocks.
|
| Reminds me of Apple's stance on mice with two or more buttons.
| To this day they still make them so it looks like it has one
| (or no) buttons.
| simonh wrote:
| HyperCard broke all the UI conventions of the Mac. You couldn't
| use it to create native look and feel Mac apps.
| CharlesW wrote:
| You absolutely could (I did a couple enterprise-y projects with
| HyperCard during that era), but it required dedication and
| discipline.
| simonh wrote:
| Fair enough, but I don't think that would be convincing to
| Jobs. It being hard to make apps idiomatic isn't ideal for an
| Apple development product. I suspect his view would be that
| this is a space better filled by an independent company that
| cares about such a product.
| tux1968 wrote:
| Interesting article from November 2011
| mimixco wrote:
| This author had it right. Apple had to kill HyperCard because it
| let users be in charge of their computers, which is anathema to
| the company's business model. In doing so, they also killed their
| chance at being in the applications software business (even
| today, they're not really a big player) and they lost out on the
| chance to define the web browser, which is what HyperCard could
| have become.
|
| I wrote a blog post about how endemic this problem has become
| across the industry, Everything Old Isn't New Again (Yet)
| https://mimix.io/en/blog/everything-old
| gardenfelder wrote:
| https://hypercard.org/
| burlesona wrote:
| Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard.
|
| Yes it was cool, but there's no conspiracy behind its demise. It
| died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same
| thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and
| universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was).
|
| HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It's not
| complicated.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think that TFA said it well, if brusquely:
|
| > 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.
|
| The thing that made HyperCard great was that it wasn't very
| capable. Which made it approachable.
| ajuc wrote:
| > Which made it approachable.
|
| And still WWW had orders of magnitude more users almost
| immediately.
|
| Hypercard is only easier to learn than "regular" programming
| languages if you're English speaker.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think that that point actually supports the gist of the
| argument.
|
| In 1995, putting together a website was _easier_ than using
| Hypercard. And so people flocked to it. Even people who
| were already somewhat familiar with Hypercard. Even though,
| at the time, Hypercard was largely more powerful. Some of
| that was because the Web made it so much easier to share.
| But I don 't think that's the whole story.
|
| Fast forward 25 years, and the Web has become much more
| powerful, but the number of people making websites
| recreationally who don't also get paid to write software
| seems to have dropped precipitously.
| Wistar wrote:
| Although it was capable of Myst.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Sure, Xcode today isn't a substitute. But Xcode is a large
| step back from what NeXTstep had, at least when it comes to
| this kind of capability.
|
| The standalone Interface Builder had palettes, which you
| could fill with custom objects. There were third party
| palettes that allowed non-programmers to click together and
| configure custom applications for specific domains.
|
| There were palettes that extended the whole shebang with
| scripting languages so that you could also add custom logic
| in Interface Builder.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| That's no different to Xcode. You just need to decorate
| properties for simple things, and maybe write a setup
| method or two if you want live-updates (eg to pull a
| weather map from a server)... Google @IBInspectable and
| @IBDesignable.
|
| Unless you're saying that the most recent versions of Xcode
| don't do that, which would be news to me.
|
| I agree that it's not well-used, but that's not the fault
| of Xcode. As far as I can tell it provides everything you'd
| need.
| debo_ wrote:
| I hope that "extended the whole shebang with scripting
| languages..." was an intentional pun.
| seumars wrote:
| >not initially as elegantly or powerfully
|
| i wouldn't call the web elegent or powerful today either
| nabla9 wrote:
| > World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing,
|
| This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you
| think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers.
| Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have
| to learn web programming to do anything.
|
| We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate
| it.
| parasubvert wrote:
| The Web was a gateway tech for a whole generation of "non
| programmers", and for at least its first 10-15 years (through
| 2005 or so) you could build reasonable sites without being a
| programmer.
|
| But as with all simple things in tech, there are more people
| whose pay depends on complexity. And so Web 2.0 rose and
| CSS+JavaScript became what it is today.
| throwanem wrote:
| You still can build reasonable sites in the circa-2005
| style - I'm actually helping one of my mentees work through
| doing just that, as a way to learn the basic concepts of
| web dev without having to fight through all the added
| abstraction that more modern tools involve.
|
| (If anything, it's easier today to build a circa-2005 style
| site than it was in 2005! The native API has grown up
| enough that you don't need jQuery any more, and honestly
| good riddance.)
|
| The trouble with the circa-2005 web is that it wasn't
| actually all that simple. You still had similar complexity
| to what people do today, but not very many ways to make
| that complexity manageable. So it was very easy to create
| situations in which things went wrong a lot and you
| couldn't really figure out why - something I think the rosy
| glow of nostalgia easily obscures, these days.
|
| My early career, in hindsight, really was built on dealing
| with that kind of "unfixable" complexity, finding ways to
| reduce or replace it or at least make it more manageable -
| if often just in self-defense, as I typically was also
| largely responsible for maintaining the same stuff I built.
| The "capstone project" of that phase was something that we
| would today describe as an SPA, built in 2011 when the
| concept barely existed - I hadn't set out to (re)invent
| that wheel, nor did I even understand until a few years
| later that that was what I had done, but I found my way to
| it as the only reasonable option for coping with the
| essential complexity of the user interaction it expressed,
| and it worked really well!
|
| That work was for one of our biggest contracts, which we
| were at risk of losing if I didn't find a way to fix their
| broken and unusable registration process. It would probably
| have sunk the company if I'd failed. Reworking it into an
| SPA _avant la lettre_ solved the problem and saved the
| contract, and it was some of the hardest work I 've ever
| done precisely because, at that time, there were no tools
| to help manage all that complexity. It's only gotten easier
| since then, as successive frameworks have built on prior
| work in removing accidental complexity and making essential
| complexity easier to express and manage.
|
| Yes, today's tools are themselves more complicated than
| jQuery or whatever, sure. That's fair. You need to spend
| more time learning how to get the most out of them, that's
| also true. But the tools also _do_ more, and largely do it
| in ways that are worth having.
|
| A Bridgeport mill takes a lot more learning than a chisel,
| too, and you can do a lot more damage with a Bridgeport
| mill used wrongly. Used _rightly_ , though, you can achieve
| far more with a Bridgeport mill, far more quickly and
| easily, than any chisel in the history of the world could
| ever let you do.
| parasubvert wrote:
| I agree, though I think the same can be said for
| HyperCard. Extending it was complicated.
| TetOn wrote:
| > You have to learn web programming to do anything.
|
| Sorry, but I don't see how that is at all different than "you
| have to learn the Hypercard scripting language to do
| anything."
| nabla9 wrote:
| Hypercard scripting was intended for non-programmers.
| Normal people can do wonders with simple tools after little
| learning. Just like people using spreadsheets. Hypercard
| made programming available for non-programmers.
| [deleted]
| throwanem wrote:
| You could learn enough HyperTalk to do useful things inside
| a day - I know; I did exactly that, when I was 11 or 12 and
| had a chance to find out on a Mac at the museum where an
| uncle of mine then worked. Granted I already had experience
| with Apple BASIC, so wasn't a complete programming novice,
| but I'd never worked in a graphical environment before, and
| yet still managed to turn out a fairly presentable, if
| short, "choose your own adventure" style game with some
| complex world state in just a few hours.
|
| It would be utterly risible to suggest that a child of
| similar age and prior experience could do the same today,
| starting from scratch with web technologies. Yes, you can
| do _more_ with the modern web. But the initial complexity
| barrier is very much higher.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yes, _todays_ web is far more complex. But the early web
| from the time when HyperCard failed was totally
| different. At that age I absolutely learned enough to
| make my own home page. For many years that 's simply all
| the web was: home pages, webrings, etc.
| parasubvert wrote:
| Not that risable: my 11 year old has gone through the
| Python Crash Course book and built a basic Django pizza
| ordering website with a database in a day.
|
| That's after work his way through much of the book, of
| course, but... as with any complex domain, the right
| teacher can make a big difference.
| throwanem wrote:
| I think that goes to both your point and mine; sure, the
| website does a little more in that it can be accessed
| from computers other than the one where it's running, but
| he also needed a whole book to do not much more than
| scratch the surface of what we call "web programming".
|
| That's not to say it isn't a significant accomplishment,
| and he should be proud of it!
| parasubvert wrote:
| I don't know that it is only scratching the surface - the
| book gets you into an interactive site that is styled
| with Bootstrap, uses a database, uses web APIs, pushes to
| Heroku so it's HA and scalable, etc.
|
| It's pretty much all the major elements of web
| programming but using the more elegant ways of
| simplifying the experience.
|
| I'm not denying the complexity just saying that there are
| still many (particularly in Python or in cloud PaaSes)
| who value streamlining the experience.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'd still call it scratching the surface in that I doubt
| it goes into details on how any of those things actually
| work, and that's an important consideration because it's
| the basis for knowing how to deal with any of them going
| wrong. No doubt you'd have been able to provide support
| in that case, but it still goes to the point of there
| being a much larger potential depth of complexity here.
|
| I get the sense the book tries to surf the reader over
| the top of most of that ocean, and that's reasonable
| enough, but the ocean is still there. I wouldn't consider
| it all that comparable to Hypercard, which in this
| metaphor I guess is more like the town pool back when
| those still existed? People who are ready for the deep
| end can dive into it, and people who feel like paddling
| around in the shallow end is more their speed can safely
| do that too.
| mimixco wrote:
| I think the key part is "in a few hours." No one, even
| professional devs, can do this "in a few hours" today.
| yoz-y wrote:
| > We should not get over it, but create replacement or
| recreate it.
|
| I feel that enough people complain about it not existing and
| then quickly proceed to not recreating it. If there was
| market for this, it would exist.
|
| I've never used Hyper Card, but I guess that for prototyping
| of 'real software', programs like InVision work. Most of the
| trivial programs you could create with HyperCard (from the
| examples shown) can be recreated in other software (like
| excel or soulver) or already exist.
| burlesona wrote:
| I learned how to build web pages by hand writing HTML and
| copy pasting it into Geocities when I was 9. It wasn't real
| programming then and it isn't now.
|
| Don't mistake the explosion of JavaScript land for being the
| same thing as the World Wide Web. Static websites are as easy
| to build now as they were in 1995, and in some ways easier.
| hyko wrote:
| If you've got something important to say, why say it like a mad,
| embittered old crank?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Because internet?
| zomglings wrote:
| This is what the internet used to be like when people had
| opinions and weren't afraid to express them in amusing ways.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Past discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685 (2019)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 (2011)
| russellthehippo wrote:
| Actual link to the "wooden stake" website is here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20111203222943/http://www.thomas...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in
| HyperCard, but I don't think that Steve Jobs killed it because it
| was some existential threat to Apple's profits. Apple gives away
| its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge
| they don't make a large fraction of money on selling software
| licenses.
|
| It's also completely possible to run your own code today on a
| Mac, so we would have to believe that Jobs was only out to get
| the in-house easy to use programming language.
|
| More likely is that Jobs wanted to use work from NextStep for OSX
| which would mean rewriting HyperCard to work with NextStep, and
| Apple wasn't exactly flush with cash when Jobs returned.
|
| One of the commenters notes that there was a clone for NextStep
| called "HyperSense" which failed to sell. So another possibility
| here is that HyperCard just wasn't as popular as we'd want it to
| be.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| > Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac,
|
| Correction: Apple charges a premium for their computers because
| that premium pays for all the software packages they include
| with it. XCode, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, etc... None of that is
| included in Windows but I can buy a fully usable by most people
| Windows laptop for $299 vs the cheapest Mac laptop is $999. Of
| course some of that $700 difference is that Mac is a better
| piece of hardware but much of it is you're paying for all the
| extra software.
|
| BTW: If I could choose to buy a Mac for $200-$300 less without
| most of the extra software I would since I don't use any of it.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| "paying for all the extra software" Are you referring to the
| productivity suite (Pages, Keynote, etc.) and GarageBand?
| These are apps that haven't seen significant new features in
| years, just occasional patches for OS requirements and a bit
| of iCloud functionality.
|
| These apps are functionally "complete." I think there's a
| pretty grey line between "you're paying for bundled software"
| and "Apple is just giving away these old things that cost
| them nothing to keep functional."
|
| If you had a peek at the spreadsheet that lists the expenses
| of "macbook" (materials, TSMC fees, industrial design man-
| hours, OS programming hours, etc.), "Pages" would not be a
| $50 line item. And if Apple dropped that bundled software
| Macbooks wouldn't drop by $200 or whatever.
| quonn wrote:
| It's a nice theory, but impossible to prove. I'd like to
| imagine the difference is because Apple makes a very nice
| profit, unlike many others.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| The bigger point is it's not free. Otherwise you can claim
| any part of a Mac is free. You're paying $999 for an OS and
| getting a free machine. You're paying $999 for a keyboard
| that has a free computer attached to it. Etc..
|
| no, you're paying $999 for the entire bundle of features
| that come with your Mac. That includes the software. It's
| not free any more than any other part of it is free.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Thank you, free was not the right choice of words. My point
| was that Apple does not make its money selling individual
| pieces of software which would be endangered by HyperCard.
| Apple should be indifferent whether someone prefers using the
| OSX calculator or a version written in HyperCard. They've
| already paid for the machine and the software before they can
| start using HyperCard.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I see it as not-invented-here. He was in love with NeXT Step
| because it was his.
|
| The Apple ][ shipped with BASIC. Apple was not founded on
| letting you _consume_ your computer.
|
| But the world had changed since the 1970's and there was a
| software ecosystem.
|
| Hypercard would seem to have brought programming to the masses.
| But by then there was a broad base of software companies that
| would provide users the calculator app, etc. This leaves
| Hypercard, like BASIC before it, a rather more beautiful and
| modern tool for nerds.
|
| And you can tell Jobs always had an uneasy relationship with
| nerds. :-)
| easton wrote:
| > He was in love with NeXTSTEP because it was his.
|
| Famously, when he returned to Apple, he used
| NeXTSTEP/OpenStep instead of a Mac until Mac OS X 10.1 came
| out and it was stable enough for production use. I can't find
| the article, but someone received an email from him around
| 2000 where the headers said NeXTMail.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12182350
| p_l wrote:
| Keynote was developed as a ripoff of the presentation
| program he used on NeXTSTEP called Concurrence, so it's an
| easy point in time to check how late (2003) Jobs used NeXT
| at least for some work.
|
| iWork suite didn't become "free" until 2013, and even then
| you have to buy a new mac or iOS device (so for example,
| given that I bought my mac used, I'd have to buy it new)
| perardi wrote:
| I think you've about got it.
|
| I _don 't_ think this was Apple's attempt to stifle the ability
| to code on your own computer. They shipped Project Builder on,
| what, day 1 of Mac OS X?
|
| It's more likely that...
|
| ...this was not super popular, as what's the possible market
| for an app that builds applets that only work on Macs? Given
| Mac marketshare at the time, maybe not a lot of hobbyists who
| (a) wanted to make an app, but (b) didn't want to dive into
| building a full UIKit application.
|
| ...this thing was confusing to market. It's hard to give the
| 1-liner description of HyperCard.
|
| ...this got dropped because it was not part of the core focus
| of getting a next-generation operating system out the door.
|
| ...maybe they didn't actually know how to rewrite it for OS X?
| Like, did anyone know how the HyperTalk interpreter worked
| besides the guy who make it?
| anthk wrote:
| |maybe they didn't actually know how to rewrite it for OS X?
|
| Carbon existed in OSX.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Late-80/early-90s Apple marketing: "The computer for the rest
| of us" and "User friendly." (doesn't work well because people
| don't want to pay extra for something that feels like it's for
| "beginners" and also don't want to think of themselves as
| "newbies" or "amateurs")
|
| Mid-90s marketing: "Think Different" (fine, but many people
| don't like to think of themselves as "weird") and "It just
| works"
|
| late 2000s, 2010s marketing: Straight up luxury branding.
| Aspirational, like a BMW, Mercedes, or a high end appliance.
| rvense wrote:
| I don't think Hypercard saw many significant updates in its
| lifetime after version 2 came out in 1989. It barely supported
| color, was never PPC native, etc. Maybe its codebase wasn't fit
| to be updated (it was a very early Mac app written mostly by
| one genius coder, after all), or maybe it was just internal
| politics that made it languish, but by the time Jobs came back
| it was already an old, weird, out-of-place product. As much as
| I love it, it was my first exposure to programming, I'm not
| really surprised it was cut, and I strongly disagree with the
| friendly article that it was some conspiracy against computer
| users' freedom.
| addicted wrote:
| I don't think the authors claim is about it killing money
| making potential.
|
| It seems to me the authors claim is that HyperCard did not
| belong to Jobs's vision of a computer as basically an
| appliance. HyperCard fit better in a vision where a computer
| was more of a tool.
| api wrote:
| Part of the actual answer is buried way down at the bottom, and
| has nothing to do with the (probably imaginary) Jobs agenda
| angle:
|
| > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple.
| But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects?
| Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And
| all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on
| being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And
| thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.
|
| That's it, not some conscious agenda by Jobs. A Mac will let you
| run anything you want, so why has nobody else made something like
| Hypercard? Why isn't there one for Linux or Windows or as a SPA
| web app?
|
| Because of the _second system effect_ and the general trend
| toward gratuitous unnecessary complexity at every level of the
| stack.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
|
| The other half of the answer is in my other reply. TL;DR: there
| are more programmers today than there were back then, but there
| are orders of magnitude more passive users who aren't "computer
| people" and just want a gadget that does a few specific things.
|
| Walled gardens primarily service the latter, and do it acceptably
| well from their perspective. For the former there's Linux,
| FreeBSD, and commercial "real computer" OSes like MacOS and
| Windows that will let you run whatever you want with the proper
| incantations.
| dsr_ wrote:
| My takeaway is this:
|
| "The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different
| world. One where the distinction between the "use" and
| "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-
| total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-
| amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world
| in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place."
|
| This is the antithesis of the UNIX way.
|
| "The essence of the UNIX philosophy is not "make small utilities
| that can be fitted together with pipes" but to assume that at any
| moment, a user might decide to be a developer or a sysadmin and
| should have the tools to do that."
|
| (unashamedly, -- me)
| vzcx wrote:
| Since I'm not sure the author (asciilifeform) is still around:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=asciilifeform
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Hypercard was awesome.
|
| Sorry to spam, but I am working on a scripting language for the
| web based on HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, to
| try to recapture that magic:
|
| https://hyperscript.org/docs <button _="on click
| transition my opacity to 0 then remove me"> Fade &
| Remove </button>
| tomcam wrote:
| Love this project. Parent is also creator of htmx
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Reminds me of AppleScript, which I don't miss at all.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| the syntax is definitely an acquired taste for developers who
| come from an Algol-derived background, but it's hard to argue
| with the readability, even if writing it is a bit unintuitive
| at first
|
| applescript is also based on hypertalk, and I believe it
| suffered being too wide open and unfocused
|
| hyperscript is much more tightly focused on DOM manipulation
| and event handling, so my hope is that it doesn't suffer from
| the usability issues that can creep in when using AppleTalk
|
| it's an experiment, so let's find out
| masoodkamandy wrote:
| Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really
| unnecessary and offensive.
|
| I was a lover of hypercard. It seemed to rekindle some if the
| magic of AppleSoft BASIC when I moved from the Apple II to the
| Mac in elementary school. I remember being surprised at how
| difficult it was to program a Mac compared to an Apple II until I
| found HyperCard. It seemed full of possibility.
| tombert wrote:
| > Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult.
| Really unnecessary and offensive.
|
| I'm inclined to agree. The word "annoying" would have worked
| about equally well without being as mean-spirited.
| [deleted]
| captaincurrie wrote:
| >Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult.
| Really unnecessary and offensive.
|
| wahhhh
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| Myst was originally built using HyperCard, which I always thought
| was rather clever
| marrvelous wrote:
| Which lead to a pretty magical moment for me as a kid. Turns
| out it's trivial to write a HyperCard program that opens
| another HyperCard stack and extract its source code.
|
| Imagine the look on our faces when my best friend and I tried
| this... and ended up getting the full source code to Myst in
| plain text. They didn't even try to obscure it.
|
| It really DeMystified (heheh) the act of professional
| development. They had used the exact same tools that I was
| proficient in to build something as meaningful and impactful as
| Myst, which literally changed the gaming world.
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| Wow that's amazing! I bet you could probably still do that
| today if you found an original version and ran it on the
| hardware.
|
| It's interesting to read here
| (http://myst.patchallel.com/myst_fl.html) how they used
| HyperCard as sort of just the "front end" to dispatch
| external commands and connect it all together. I just used
| Godot to make a game, my first that I've ever completed
| (including save/load functionality!). The interface and UI
| building tools, once you climb the gentle learning curve, are
| really quite incredible and the theming options gives you
| extensibility to define your aesthetic. If programming
| languages like Python or even Rust had this sort of quality
| WSYIWYG VB-style form editor, I think we could see a
| renaissance in desktop apps. I know at one time the Godot
| folks were considering Python as the scripting language for
| the engine.
| analog31 wrote:
| I loved HyperCard. A Mac with Hypercard allowed me to completely
| bypass the entire Windows 3.1 era. I wrote some insane things in
| HC. By the time HC was ready to die, Visual Basic was ready to
| use.
|
| Of course it would be offensive to compare VB to HC, given that
| VB was worse in a lot of ways. Bear with me. ;-)
|
| What HC did was provide an extremely limited palette of system
| features for you to play with. It was extensible, but only with
| difficulty, and there weren't many good extensions. (I used one
| that gave me access to the Mac serial port, and wrote one of my
| own that talked to a National Instruments data acquisition
| board). But I think the limitations were part of the secret of
| why it was so clean and easy to learn.
|
| VB tried to be too much, by giving you all of the knobs and
| controls that let you create commercial-looking software. But you
| paid the price in complexity, and ultimately bloat. When VB-dot-
| net came along, I jumped ship and landed in the Python world.
|
| And in the time between the introductions of HC and VB, computers
| got more complicated, with things like networking and databases
| that people wanted to mess with. And still more complicated
| between VB and VB-dot-net. Providing just the right degree of
| control for novices to write interesting programs, without
| exposing the ugly innards of the system, or deluging us with
| options, has always been the challenge of creating programming
| tools for the rest of us.
|
| The rising complexity and expectations for modern computers is
| why it would be hard to resurrect HyperCard.
|
| A non-obvious feature of HyperCard is that projects could be
| shared and distributed in source code form, meaning that there
| was no distinction between the development and user environments.
| It wasn't in text format, but a HC stack had a nearly 100% chance
| of working on someone else's computer without needing to worry
| about installers, dependencies, and so forth. And folks were
| encouraged to look at someone's code and learn from it.
|
| There has always been a niche that blurs "use" and "programming,"
| which is what is generically called "scientific programming." I
| work almost entirely within the Python ecosystem. I'm as happy,
| if not happier, than I ever was with HyperCard. A trick that I
| employ to deal with the complexity of the system is: _Don 't try
| to make it look and behave like real software."_
| parasubvert wrote:
| This is a great point.
|
| Also, the environment that feels most like an environment for
| "not really programmers but sort of if I need to" is the
| Jupyter Notebook ecosystem which evolved out of IPython. It's
| like a spreadsheet for telling a narrative.
| analog31 wrote:
| These days, Jupyter Notebook is my brain. Other than for the
| hidden state problem, it's the best thing since sliced bread.
| In fact, my favorite way of sharing "software" is in this
| form.
| sitkack wrote:
| Jupyter notebooks are great but they don't have the
| physical immediacy of HC. Maybe we should build that in,
| there _are_ some physical widgets that can be put on the
| notebook to interact with the user code, so the mechanism
| is there.
|
| On the Amiga we had a system called CanDo that was very
| similar to Hypercard in how it enabled end users to make
| multimedia applications. The interview below has some
| excellent insight into CanDo and the relationship it had
| with HyperCard.
|
| http://www.rcfinch.com/Amiga/INOVAtronicsInterview.pdf
|
| And I was reminded of these other application building
| tools, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_programming_lang
| uages#Ap... the 3d construction kit kind of occupied the
| same place as minecraft for a lot of kids in the 90s.
|
| *edit, his is fascinating
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperland
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY
| tombert wrote:
| Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is
| something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had
| been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project
| working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very
| quickly able to make interactive stuff.
|
| I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had
| a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, you
| could figure out how to make buttons and event mappings, and I
| thought it was so cool that you could easily _animate_ things in
| the form of movie clips without having to finagle with cycling
| through sprites. I made simple point and click adventures,
| interactive menus, and once I took physics and calculus in high
| school, a very simple platformer. It was a lot of fun.
|
| Nowadays the closest thing I've found for a similar level of
| easiness is GameMaker Studio, and I have a copy (legitimate this
| time :) ), and it's fun to play with, but it still feels more
| complicated than it needs to be. With Flash, I never had to learn
| about shader programming or anything like that. To be clear, I'm
| not trying to _knock_ GameMaker for this, it 's a great tool,
| it's just not as simple as Flash, for better or worse.
|
| Obviously Flash Player needed to die, and I'm not suggesting we
| resurrect it. It was a horrible buggy mess a lot of the time
| (especially on non-Windows platforms in my experience), but I
| don't feel like we've really "replaced" it fully yet, at least
| not on the development side.
|
| Hypercard was a bit before my time, sadly (we didn't have a
| working Mac in the 90s), but it looks like something I would have
| really enjoyed playing with.
| ksec wrote:
| >I'm not suggesting we resurrect it
|
| They should and open source it.
| grishka wrote:
| There is a very active open-source project called Ruffle[1]
| which aims to reimplement Flash Player to play the already
| existing Flash content. It runs in the browser via WASM as well
| as a standalone native app on all three desktop OSes. It
| doesn't support AS3 yet.
|
| But as far as I can tell, there's no one trying to recreate
| Flash the authoring program. Which is a big shame IMO. We need
| something that enables creativity with a low barrier to entry.
|
| [1] https://ruffle.rs
| Jetrel wrote:
| Yeah - now that a legacy of flash apps exist, having a
| runtime for them is important.
|
| But as you say - back in the old days, the truly important
| thing had nothing to do with the runtime, and had everything
| to do with the authoring program.
|
| Someone really needs to build something similar, and -
| because we're starting in a later era, the only influence it
| needs to take from flash lies in the UI/UX.
| tombert wrote:
| Ruffle is pretty sweet, it resurrected Homestar Runner so I
| legally have to love it.
|
| As I said, I do think GameMaker is a reasonable enough
| substitute for stuff. While I find having to write shaders a
| bit irritating, you don't have to do it very often, and you
| can get up and running in a fairly short amount of time, and
| it's HTML5 exporter works pretty much perfectly from what
| I've played with. Is it as easy as Flash? No, but it's still
| a pretty low barrier-to-entry for people, I think I could
| probably teach a kid how to use it and they'd pick up the
| basics.
| jchw wrote:
| What about Adobe Animate? Granted, I haven't actually tried,
| but my understanding is that it is like Flash but targeting the
| modern web.
| tombert wrote:
| I haven't tried it, though if I recall they've greatly
| started de-emphasizing the coding aspect of it.
|
| Even still, I don't believe I can export directly to anything
| supported nowadays, right? Does the HTML5 exporter work?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Adobe Animate is actively developed and supported, so I'm
| sure it still exports to HTML5.
| jchw wrote:
| It seems to still support ActionScript 3, though again, not
| personally experienced. Still, this would suggest you can
| export an existing Flash project to HTML5:
| https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/create-publish-
| html5-...
|
| edit: Looking more closely, I do now see that you have to
| manually convert the AS3 when exporting to HTML5. That's a
| bummer.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I thought. I remember hearing that you
| couldn't magically export your AS3 into HTML5 like you
| can with something like GameMaker.
|
| Somewhat ironically, due to something like Ruffle,
| exporting to an SWF like before might actually be a
| viable option again, since you'd get all the nice
| sandboxing of modern browsers while having pretty-ok
| flash compatibility.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I tried it out when it was called Edge and found it really
| easy to make interactive stuff using it! Since I've never
| made anything using Flash I don't know and would be quite
| interested in what it's lacking in comparison.
| protomyth wrote:
| _What about Adobe Animate?_
|
| "Get Animate as part of Adobe Creative Cloud for just
| US$20.99/mo." from
| https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
|
| It would be a hard thing to ask various professions that
| developed content using HyperCard to fork over the money.
| jchw wrote:
| This _is_ a subthread about Flash and not HyperCard,
| though, and Flash itself has been on this subscription
| model prior to the introduction of Animate. For around 3
| years if memory serves correct. Though truthfully, it would
| be most fair to just consider Animate to be a rebranding of
| Flash, since as far as I know it's the same codebase.
| tombert wrote:
| That's why I haven't actually tried Animate yet. I
| eventually bought a legitimate copy of Flash 8, and paid
| for the upgrade licenses all the way up to CS6, but when
| they changed the pricing model to be subscription based I
| pretty much said "screw this" and jumped ship.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Flash was the perfect tool for someone to go from absolute
| beginner to fairly proficient developer. You could pick up the
| tool and the very first thing you could do was draw shapes, or
| maybe even a robot. Then you figured out you could animate them
| along a timeline, so now you can make the legs of your robot
| move from one side of the screen to another. Then you realized
| each shape is a discrete object, and you can attach scripts to
| that object to fire a laser across the screen, then...
|
| As much as I appreciated having more advanced tools like Unity
| later in my career, you can't beat the self discovery that was
| possible with Flash.
| tombert wrote:
| Totally agree, and that's what I love about it, it allows you
| to focus on the _fun_ parts of building games (e.g. moving
| graphics around, designing your own perfect control scheme)
| instead of spending twelve hours learning the intricacies of
| shader programming and whatnot.
| tarsinge wrote:
| You touch on something that for me is the real issue: there is
| only one level of complexity today: maximum.
|
| Building a blog, a news website, a niche web app, or the new
| Facebook, it nearly doesn't matter, you must use the latest
| state of art tools. We have completely lost all the
| intermediate levels between beginner and professional.
|
| Sometimes it's justified as an unfortunate effect of the
| internet for sites and apps handling personal and sensitive
| data, something that the semi-professional 90's shareware
| didn't have to deal with. But I feel like that doesn't explain
| it all.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Well there's always PICO-8.
|
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
| tombert wrote:
| Pico-8 is a lot of fun, I made a ray-casting FPS thing in
| there a few years ago.
|
| That said, Pico-8 is (purposefully) limited pretty
| substantially. You can only have like 32kb of RAM, you are
| really limited in your sprite size, and I think the built-
| in editor is kind of annoying.
|
| Flash was fun because it was super easy to get into, but it
| kind of felt like a "big kid" programming environment.
| While I know the performance wasn't great, outside of that
| I never felt _limited_ by Flash.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| PICO-8 has 2 MB of Lua RAM (every Lua variable is 64 bits
| minimum so that's not a _huge_ lot to play with). If the
| limitations feel too restricting, there 's always TIC-80.
|
| https://tic80.com/
| phailhaus wrote:
| I commented the same sentiment a while back and someone pointed
| me to Construct [1] as a spiritual successor to Flash!
|
| [1] https://www.construct.net/
| tombert wrote:
| I actually have a license to Construct as well, and like
| GameMaker it's fun and I do like it (though I think I
| actually like GameMaker a bit more).
|
| I haven't used it in like 6 years, so my knowledge is fairly
| out of date, but if I remember correctly, it's kind of
| lacking my favorite feature from Flash: the ability to use a
| professional-grade animation tool _directly within the
| program_. No messing with exporting sprite sheets or a series
| of bitmaps or anything, you can just create a movie clip,
| double click it, animate it, go back, and click "export to
| code". It's a true "one-stop-shop" for doing almost
| everything in your project.
|
| GameMaker actually has a pretty-ok sprite animation system
| built in, good enough for most retro-style games, but it's
| still pretty weak compared to Flash for anything more
| complex.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Looks like Construct has an Animations Editor too :) I get
| where you're coming from though, Flash was directly
| responsible for that golden age of creativity, because it
| was so accessible that literally children were making cool
| things with it.
|
| https://www.construct.net/en/make-
| games/manuals/construct-3/...
| tombert wrote:
| I knew you could tweak imported animations and stuff, but
| it didn't hold a candle to Flash's stuff, since Flash was
| an "animation-first" program.
|
| Maybe I need to play with Construct again though, it's
| probably improved substantially in six years.
| II2II wrote:
| I suspect that there is a sweet spot for learning and teaching
| programming, and it typically happens soon after a new
| technology emerges. There is a lot of excitement, many low-
| hanging fruit, and the tools tend to be easier to work with. As
| time goes on, there is less motivation since the excitement has
| diminished and there are fewer unique contributions to make.
| More important though, the tools become more complex since
| their development has to address the needs of larger projects
| with more specific needs.
|
| I have seen this pattern repeat several times over in my life:
| programming personal computers with BASIC in the 1980's and web
| development in the late 1990's are the most obvious examples.
| HyperCard sort of fits in between since it was one of the more
| accessible GUI development tools, though it was by no means the
| only one.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think people give Hypercard (and Flash) too much credit. Its
| easy to make UIs if you use absolute resolution and position. You
| can make apps with about the same effort today using a lot of
| modern WYSIWYG tools but its the scaling layouts that are so
| tedious.
| groovypuppy wrote:
| On the contrary, I think people don't give Hypercard (and
| Flash) not enough credit. These tools were not about UIs. They
| were about enabling mere mortals to make their own tools (apps,
| games, etc.) - often for personal use. The idea of enabling
| users to make their own tools easily(or fix their own tools for
| that matter) is a noble one that unfortunately seems to have
| ran against Apples core mission.
| seumars wrote:
| You're not taking into the account the context in which
| Hypercard existed, that is, a time where UI design was in its
| infancy.
| rwmj wrote:
| Tcl/Tk solved the scalable user interface problem back in the
| mid 90s. The fact that other toolkits are terrible at it is no
| real excuse.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| >Apple never again brought to market anything resembling
| HyperCard
|
| I would argue that Swift Playgrounds also attempts to make
| software creation simple enough for anyone, but with a real
| programming language instead of a scripting language.
| donatj wrote:
| Quartz Composer had a very similar sort of level of ease of use.
| Drag some components out, wire them together, add some
| AppleScript or JavaScript if you want. And of course Apple has
| let that whither on the vine for the last ten years.
|
| I still use it on occasion to debug HID devices because it's so
| fricken easy. Drag out the HID block, pick my device, drag the
| value I want to inspect onto a text render block. Done. Updates
| in real-time, essentially built an HID oscilloscope.
|
| Update - old video of me using it to inspect a keyboard
|
| - https://twitter.com/donatj/status/1223093796558209026
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| To be fair, that's because the author of the project left
| Apple, and it was a one-man project.
|
| I think the framework is even deprecated now.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| You have to scroll down past the last screenshot before the part
| of the article related to the headline begins. The rest is just
| filler.
|
| The argument isn't super clear and it is not anything resembling
| an official or definitive answer to the headline.
|
| Tl;dr: the author believes that hypercard was in the way of
| making the Mac a consumption device, because it allowed users to
| make their own things instead of buying it via the Apple store.
| tyingq wrote:
| I've never used Hypercard, but after reading the article and
| looking at the screenshots, it seems similar to my experience
| using bubble.io. I suspect the calculator example would be very
| similar.
| massysett wrote:
| If Hypercard were so wonderful, then someone else would have made
| something similar and it would have went on to world domination.
| Instead, all we're left with are occasional posts on Hacker News
| about how wonderful Hypercard was, some adoring comments about
| the wonder of Hypercard, and some fan websites. Then it falls
| back into obscurity - or, possibly, there are indeed Hypercard
| clones available, but they don't inspire the same nostalgia.
|
| Geeks keep all sort of obscure things alive - GNU Emacs, OpenTTD,
| ReactOS. Either there are indeed Hypercard-like things out there,
| or this really is nothing more than nostalgia.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Hypercard was a work of genius. A software masterpiece. It was
| quite easy to learn. It enabled beginners as well as thousands of
| people without technical education (e.g. most educators) by
| providing the versatility needed to fairly simply create
| thousands of responsive, easily-extensible, practical apps. _And
| they did._
|
| IMO, that's why it had to die ... and why it was not handed to
| its many user groups. Noble attempts to recreate its facility
| failed for lack of its ubiquity. One of the saddest stories in
| personal computing.
| coldtea wrote:
| The conclusion feels bogus and forced:
|
| > _The various HyperCard clones and HyperCard-influenced software
| lack HyperCard 's radical simplicity and the resulting
| explorability. Explorability of the "master of all you survey"
| variety matters. All of the extra features in a more feature-rich
| system like SuperCard (or even VB) are not harmless. There is a
| fundamental difference, especially for a child, between a system
| which you can fully wrap your mind around and one with countless
| mystery knobs._
|
| Says who?
|
| > _4. Everybody pushing Javascript, Python, Wx /Qt, Cocoa, and
| other abominations as "HyperCard replacements" simply does not
| remember being a child. And/or lacks a creative bone in his body.
| And/or is a malicious idiot._
|
| Or the author might remember being a kid himself, but he doesn't
| know what is to be a kid in 2021. There are kids todays (even
| 8-12 year olds) who do more with Javascript, Python, Swift
| Playgrounds etc, than the best things ever done with HyperCard.
|
| And the reason they don't use something like one of HyperCards
| successors, is not that it's 'too complicated', but that it
| doesn't really solve problems they have in 2021.
|
| > _But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train
| for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid
| down_
|
| And yet Apple under Jobs and later, continued to ship
| AppleScript, shipped Swift Playground, and other such tools. And
| their subsidiary makes a powerful "build your own app" tool
| (FileMaker).
|
| It's BS to present it as if HyperCard-made basically toy apps
| would be some kind of threat (or even just perceived as such) to
| Apple's bottom line or core products.
|
| HyperCard alongside with other stuff was killed to re-focus Apple
| and save it. Apple was dying in near bankruptcy with HyperCard
| and Newton and everything - not only they weren't some big
| success, but not even the core offerings were much of success at
| the time either.
|
| > _Seems like many readers continue to miss the essential point,
| just as they did in 2011._
|
| Or the point was bogus and the author insists on flogging a dead
| horse (or blowing a rusty trumpet)...
| marrvelous wrote:
| Agreed. The conclusion of the article feels pretty unsupported,
| especially considering that AppleTalk still survives to this
| day.
| chasing wrote:
| I don't buy this argument.
|
| There has been nothing stopping other companies from releasing
| HyperCard-style tools for the Mac. And many have. But they have
| (as far as I'm aware) not dominated nor flourished particularly
| well.
|
| What may have seemed amazing to a few people -- including me; I
| loved HyperCard as a kid! -- was possibly simply not the most
| valuable use of time, especially for a company trying to dig
| itself out of the hole Apple was in during the late 90s.
|
| As far as "use" and "programming" being kept separate in modern
| computers:
|
| 1) I don't think this is something a company even as powerful as
| Apple can control. Third parties would fill in the gap if masses
| of people were clamoring for a HyperCard-like experience. And
| arguably they have. You're reading this in a web browser, right?
|
| 2) I just don't buy that we're in some digital dystopia with an
| Iron Curtain between "users" and "programmers." What you can do
| with a computer just with "use" and not "programming" is just
| insane compared to the 1990s. "Non-technical" people who need to
| get something done can find a wide range of powerful tools to do
| the job. No one needs to make a calculator from scratch. No one
| needs to make most of the software tools they need in the day-to-
| day from scratch. And, again, there are plenty of available tools
| that allow for light scripting to give "non-programmers" even
| more control. And of course there are professional programmers
| who can do things with computers that lay people cannot. This
| would be true regardless of the existence of HyperCard.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I found the discontinuation of Hypercard really surprising,
| since Hypercard was what made Macs useful as "business
| computers" in the niche places where I saw them used.
|
| For example, the musical instrument store where I worked in
| during high school used Hypercard to keep all their customer
| records and maintain an inventory of all their equipment. This
| was all based on custom "stacks" which were in turn lightly
| modified from included example stacks to add their specific
| business logic. (For example: the stacks would calculate rental
| fees and late rental charges instantly based on the store's
| arcane formulae. They would produce reports telling us who was
| late on rent and who was most likely to get _really_ late. The
| stacks were constantly under development, which usually meant:
| we need a feature, let 's pop the hood and add three lines of
| code.)
|
| At the end of the day HC was just a single-machine database
| with an amazing programmable custom interface builder. This
| would have been obvious to me if I'd been older and understood
| these ideas, but I didn't realize how _useful_ the combination
| was until many years later when I started building web apps. It
| occurred to me that what I was doing was basically making a
| much crummier version of Hypercard (albeit with a shared
| Internet-hosted database, which Hypercard did not have back
| then) at something like 100x the programming effort. I remember
| seeing that MS Access had some kind of interface builder, but
| it was a pile of hot garbage compared to Hypercard.
|
| TL;DR if Hypercard had managed to stay the course and improve
| itself for that use-case I think Macs would have been vastly
| more useful to (at least small) businesses. Instead Macs went
| through a dark period where the nearly got killed by Windows,
| and were basically only saved by Jobs' attention to design plus
| Microsoft's reluctant benevolence.
| jandrese wrote:
| > There has been nothing stopping other companies from
| releasing HyperCard-style tools for the Mac. And many have. But
| they have (as far as I'm aware) not dominated nor flourished
| particularly well.
|
| None of them shipped with the OS. Maybe today it would make
| more sense to ship something like a Livecode educational
| version on Raspbian.
| arbirk wrote:
| Hypercard was great as a drag and drop "app" builder. Apple
| actually coded up iWeb a few years later, for which Hypercard
| could have been an excellent foundation.
|
| There is still no great tool for preschoolers to start
| programming. Scratch is great but limited by its web and flash
| roots.
|
| I have very fond memories of getting balls to bounce on edges and
| sprites as a kid. RIP Hypercard
| jandrese wrote:
| There has been some idle speculation over the years that adding
| a way to load stack pages over the network would have created
| the interactive web back in the prehistoric web days. The
| flipside of this is it would have been basically Flash,
| complete with all of the security nightmares that entails. Old
| MacOS was not built with security in mind. Also of course it
| would have been trapped on Macs.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Jobs had the balls to do to Hypercard what Adobe didn't do to
| Flash. If Hypercard was so amazing then why did products like
| Supercard fail. It matched Hypercard's feature set and was able
| to run on Windows and Macs.
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, there's a lot of potential reasons, maybe because it
| didn't have the marketing budget of a
| multi-[million|billion|trillion] dollar company behind it?
| Maybe it tried to be too much? It's tough to say.
| sjwright wrote:
| HyperCard would have been a great platform if it was
| aggressively iterated. Despite being way ahead of its time in
| 1987, it died because it stood still and the world eventually
| passed it by.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Aggressively iterating it would make it too complicated to
| use for beginners which would also cause it to lose
| popularity.
| soapdog wrote:
| Couple years ago, I wrote a commentary inspired by this post
| highlighting that there is a readly available HyperCard-like
| system called LiveCode. I went on to demonstrate the creation of
| the same project and some more. It is basically the same source.
|
| https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp...
|
| PS: I no longer work for LiveCode but I did back when I wrote
| that article.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a
| collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the
| Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is
| they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want
| and press start.
|
| You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-
| your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching
| materials[6]. But there's so much more in the collection.
|
| I thoroughly recommend that those unfamiliar with HyperCard have
| a browse of the collection and see what was made possible by this
| groundbreaking 1980s tool.
|
| I'm always looking for more stacks for the collection - if anyone
| reading this has any (either already as digital files or on
| floppy disks), please do email me: HyperCardOnline@gmail.com
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof
|
| [3] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit
|
| [4] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out
|
| [5] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11
|
| [6] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-
| earth-...
| tarsinge wrote:
| Thank you, I remember playing Inigo gets out when I was a
| child!
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| What a wonderful collection. Thank you!
| spitfire wrote:
| I had a look at the first link and tried two decks at random.
| The very first one was a "gayme" (Get it? We're gay! It was the
| early 1990's), the second one "models" was girls in bikinis
| (Nice dithering!).
|
| Point I'm making is that hypercard gave access to absolutely
| everyone. Which means it was used far outside the normal niche
| technical interests.
|
| It's sort of a neat archaeological dig into the mind of a broad
| spectrum of people at the time. Rather than a slice of niche
| technical individuals.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| Indeed. The "gayme" one you mention is called Caper in the
| Castro, and is considered one of (if not the) earliest known
| LGBTQ video games.
|
| https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| The landscape of computing has DRAMATICALLY changed since
| hypercard, this feels really revisionist to say this:
|
| "Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer
| to be a "bicycle for the mind." But what he really sold us was a
| (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only
| where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel
| elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of
| laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)"
|
| So dramatic! Cmon now.
|
| The sentiment at the bottom is what rings most true, you could
| fit the entire manual for hypercard in your head, and achieve
| proficiency much faster than many tools.
| skedaddle wrote:
| Ah, loper-os.org. The saner, more competent Richard Kulisz. I
| miss this kind of thought leadership. Though not the
| beratement...
| ungzd wrote:
| What are key differences between Hypercard and "Rapid Application
| Development", "Visual Programming" tools like Visual Basic?
|
| Visual Basic is not dead, it's still in development (although in
| .NET form, which might have steeper learning curve). It was
| highly hyped in past too, but now it has only niche uses, and
| it's used not as "bicycle for mind", instead mostly for handling
| bureaucracy in large corporations.
|
| I'm sure "calculator" example will be very similar in Visual
| Basic.
|
| There are lots of no-code, low-code tools but they almost always
| fail and become discontinued quickly. Only spreadsheets thrive
| out of these.
|
| There should be other reasons for that, not "corporations don't
| want users to program their computers".
| thrower123 wrote:
| There is a disturbing tendency to try to sideline imperfect, but
| productive and accessible programming environments in favor of
| both more complicated, heavyweight "real" programmer languages,
| or on the other extreme, extremely limited no-code/low-code
| solutions that are frustrating and impossible to do anything
| beyond toy workflows.
|
| This ground that HyperCard or Visual Basic 6 or Flash occupied
| has been ruthlessly razed and salted.
| stupidcar wrote:
| Those accessible programming environments tended to exhibit
| exponentially worsening performance and maintainability
| characteristics as the complexity of the system being built
| with them grew.
|
| This would be have been fine, so long as these systems remained
| relatively simple, and were rebuilt in more heavyweight but
| scalable languages once they reached a certain level of
| complexity. But that isn't what happened. Instead, they just
| kept growing into twisted, unmaintainable monsters that
| organisations were completely reliant upon, but which were an
| absolute nightmare to maintain and extend.
|
| As a result, the industry shifted to encouraging the use of
| "real" programming languages for everything, even the simplest
| systems, because the greater up-front costs were saved many
| times over by having a sane story for long-term maintenance and
| improvement.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Is this really the case, or does stuff just continue flowing
| into the tools that are still accessible to users?
|
| I have seen an incredible number of businesses that run off
| of either Excel spreadsheets, or glomped together masses of
| Salesforce customizations. I'm not convinced that this is an
| improvement in matters.
|
| I also think that there's just a lot of custom software that
| doesn't get built.
| bzzzt wrote:
| I believe the web has killed a lot of those 'single user'
| Excel applications. If they had value, they would probably
| have been reimplemented in the back-end of new web-based
| business services (if you're unlucky by 'enterprise
| programmers') around the turn of the century.
| anthonygd wrote:
| > As a result, the industry shifted to encouraging the use of
| "real" programming languages for everything, even the
| simplest systems, because the greater up-front costs were
| saved many times over by having a sane story for long-term
| maintenance and improvement.
|
| That makes a certain amount of sense; I know I've sworn at
| insane Excel spreadsheets that have lived far longer than
| they should have.
|
| The thing I'd argue is that the vast majority of business
| tools are only useful for very few people for a very short
| period of time. Sometimes they are never useful. Doing those
| in a "real" language can have an ROI of centuries (or never),
| so just never get automated or tried. There's a very
| important place for cheap prototyping and if non-developers
| can do it that's even better.
| parasubvert wrote:
| This isn't necessarily a vendor-led phenomenon as it is a
| mutual conspiracy between customers and vendors.
|
| It is a pendulum swing between different members of the
| industry, some that prefer complexity as the source of their
| job security, and those that prefer simplicity and beauty (even
| if there are limitations).
|
| Arguably NeXT IB and Objective C tried to straddle both worlds
| (and slid into complexity over time with iOS And MacOS)
|
| Also See: Heroku vs Kubernetes
| jcelerier wrote:
| > This ground that HyperCard or Visual Basic 6 or Flash
| occupied has been ruthlessly razed and salted.
|
| why build software that empowers people to also build software
| easily, when you can charge thousand of EURs in consultancy
| fees
| krallja wrote:
| (2011)
| dfabulich wrote:
| IMO, the important question isn't "why did Hypercard die," but
| rather, "why hasn't anyone rebuilt it, or built something
| better?"
|
| The author's answer to this question is totally wrong.
|
| > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple.
| But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects?
| Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And
| all of them are failures for the same reason: _they insist on
| being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard._ And
| thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.
|
| Really? Nobody _ever_ had the intelligence and discipline to
| design a simple GUI builder in the history of computing since
| Hypercard?
|
| No, the answer is that there are numerous simple GUI builders,
| including GUI builders for the web. But none of them are
| _popular_ , due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that
| Hypercard hit.
|
| When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and
| there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac,
| the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code,
| with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a
| professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user
| with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got
| Hypercard, or nothing. This created a _community_ of Hypercard
| enthusiasts.
|
| Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen
| resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342
| pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on
| any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things
| to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the
| screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9
| monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver /
| theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a
| GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as
| easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going
| to look _exactly_ like that everywhere. "
|
| The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes:
| it's a _small_ step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML /CSS. You
| don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade
| HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn,
| but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no
| problem.
|
| As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it
| was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend
| to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so
| none of them can build a community with real traction.
| twic wrote:
| > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple.
| But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects?
| Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And
| all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on
| being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And
| thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.
|
| Eh. Making a calculator in LiveCode is a similar complexity to
| doing it in HyperCard:
|
| https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_developme...
|
| HyperCard and its successors are an accessible way to make very
| simple, fun little apps. You can use them to make more complex
| apps, but it's not significantly easier to use HyperCard than
| more conventional tools to do that. I think the reason HyperCard-
| like tools are not popular today is simply that there is little
| demand for such apps.
| parasubvert wrote:
| This is from 2011 and has been posted 6 or 7 times over the
| years.
|
| It has one interesting point: complexity is our industry's
| addiction and downfall, but blames the wrong person. it's not
| Steve Jobs' fault that customers want what they want.
|
| The dream that we'd all be in a web based on HyperCard is no
| different from other the Squeak Smalltalk folks or LOGO fans etc.
| Elegant, beautiful interactive environments to help people learn
| computers, but never became mainstream problem solvers. It's an
| old tale.
|
| Otherwise it is mostly a "get off my lawn" rant.
|
| (For those that don't know about Squeak, Alan Kay believed in
| children's programming so much they went to Disney - Disney! - to
| create Squeak, named after Mickey Mouse, as a next gen Smalltalk
| for kids.)
| jecel wrote:
| Squeak was started at Apple. But when Steve Jobs came back to
| Apple and decided to kill research, they had to move elsewhere.
| They were able to convince Apple to release Squeak as open
| source (their very first attempt to do so) so they wouldn't
| have to start over at their new home.
| elondaits wrote:
| Not convinced by the author's theory.
|
| If you extend Hypercard to its logical conclusion you get either
| Flash or a browser running HTML locally. In any case you get a
| security nightmare, a lot of duplicated efforts, and the need to
| solve hard problems which didn't exist back then such as adapting
| UI to different screen sizes, accessibility,
| internationalization, publishing stacks on the web, etc.
|
| Also, there were some commercial products developed with
| Hypercard back in the day... but these days you'd need a
| different development environment that supports things like
| versioning to entertain that possibility.
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