I'm just going to talk about Hypercard again for a bit.
It frustrates me to no end that the only way to run hypercard stacks today is to boot a Mac Classic emulator, and the load the stack in to hypercard in the emulator.
AFAIK, the whole thing was interpreted. We should be able to write a hypercard player for any platform.
Hypercard was a tool for Non-programmers to make programs.
The things that were made in hypercard are pretty simple, all things considered, but they could look and feel very polished, and it was way ahead of a lot of other tools in that regard.
If you've never used it, think of Hypercard as Powerpoint with functions and variable.
Hypercard could be used to build full applications. Things that looked liked Native MacOS apps.
Douglas Adams wrote this app for calculating the volume of the nest of some bird I've never seen: https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode
But beyond calculating the volume of the nests of obscure birds, Hypercard could be used to stitch together applications that did pretty much anything.
Myst was built in Hypercard, for example. But so were hundreds of other games and programs by amateurs.
The point of hypercard was that it was accessible to people who were not developers. Anyone could reasonably build something with this tool.
Most people that I've spoken to about it said that it felt to them like the future.
And we let it die.
It doesn't exist anymore. Even accessing things that were written with it takes an unreasonable amount of effort.
It is entirely unreasonable that these labors be lost today, but they are. (We are shitty stewards of history.)
Lots of companies out there, and a few open source projects, have tried to bring Hypercard back to the world.
Livecode is a pretty decent example. Their platform is pretty easy to use, and you can make some cool apps that are crossplatform with it. iOS, Android, Web, whatever. There's even an Open Source version.
But live code is still way more complicated than hypercard ever was. As a developer, I find it limiting. As a hobbyist, I find it needlessly complex.
All the big open source projects tend to suffer from the same kind of feature creep. Or, not even feature creep. It's not that they end up too complex, it's that they start that way.
These aren't tools built for users, to make it easy for a user to make things. These are tools built for developers, to make it less painful to do the stuff they don't like doing.
That's fine, I guess, but that's not what made hypercard special.
@ajr We need something for software development similar to how Scratch is for game design + animation
@cigazze I mean, if it's done right it'll be better for some kinds of game development than scratch.
@ajr yeah true, Scratch isn't very powerful + is pretty kid-oriented. just the best already-existent example I can think of
@ajr I fully agree, but this means introducing people gently into coding, as I gather from your #HyperCard posts, not necessarily giving them 'simple' tools but powerful ones.
And it does not have to mean that they need to start with if(){}else{};
@saper go spend some time with HyperCard in an emulator, so you can understand where im coming from. I think you'll be impressed.
@ajr I read a lot about it I think I know what you mean, will try for real
@ajr even as a professional programmer, I find it obnoxious how hard it is to make tools to make my life easier. I’m not so enamored of programming that I want to do it in my off-time to make my work-time more efficient. :/
I'm intrigued by this thought.
Would you include things which help creative types to do their work?
Editor apps for writers?
Things like Mastodon which let us chat async?
@Algot the conversation started as a discussion of the old HyperCard app for Mac, which was a tool to let non-programmers build applications and games.
In general, though, yes. Text editors, word processors, image editors, etc. those are tools to help people make things. They should be accessible for non-technical users. The barrier of entry must be lowered.
I *loved* HyperCard, using it with my middle school students.
I am consistently dismayed by the lack of new versions of such seminal applications.
@Algot There is an "almost" hypercard clone called Live Code. It has an open source version, and would probably be great for classroom use.
It's not as easy as hypercard, but it's a bit more powerful (the nature of programs has changed, LiveCode adapted with it.)
I still think it's not to the point of usability that Hypercard was, but it's closer than anything else I've seen.
Twine also serves as a good hypercard analog, from the hypertext side of things.
Planning and usability often take a backseat to showing off how awesome you can code stuff and how many features you can jam in.
But sometimes someone smart AND geared towards building comprehensible tools works out an adapter technology (like Mastodon built on top of GNU social, if I'm not mistaken -- I don't know as much about the latter as the former, and I know very little about the underlying aspects of the former).
We need more tools built for regular folks. We need more tools that don't come with the baggage of learning to code, of dealing with the open source community.
We need more tools that help people do things, rather than just tools that help coders code.