[jawngee]

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]

> 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]

> > 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.

[jawngee]

> Hypercard is different from systems like Director > in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.

No offense, but you're reaching for straws now. Any stack of any complexity was just as complex as the equivalent in Director. I'm not sure what you were doing in 96 or so, but I was making a living with Director after cutting my teeth with some serious SuperCard action. I wrote a precursor to AIM/ICQ for our feeble AppleTalk network with SuperCard and that was not simple at all.

I guess if you were writing simple back and forth stacks, then yes I see your argument. But anything truly useful beyond that was just as complex as anything else. I appreciate your romantic notions to the contrary however.

[thaumaturgy]

I never used Director, so I can't speak to that. And, by '96, I had graduated from HyperCard into C and Pascal.

But: I spent a lot of time in HyperCard, and I can assure you that the field of HyperCard complexity was not limited to just "simple back and forth stacks" or "anything truly useful beyond that". HyperCard afforded a really nice way of gradually ramping up complexity and approaching complex-on-the-outside problems with simple-on-the-inside code.

I doubt I could remember any of my own HyperCard projects at this point if my life depended on it. But, I can tell you about a HyperCard project a good friend of mine did: he called it "MusicMaker", and it came with a piano keyboard, multiple synthesizers, and its own unique musical notation system which allowed you to easily translate any sheet music into text which the HyperCard stack could synthesize and play on the piano keys. It could teach people music better than just about any other piece of software at the time. This was not, as I recall, remarkably challenging for him, and we both had a lot of fun with it.

I think any network-related programming is going to suck. Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus had an entire chapter devoted to it, as I recall, in which most of the chapter could be summed up as, "OpenTransport sucks". So, I don't think it's fair to use a networking-related program as an example of a challenging HyperCard (or SuperCard) project.

> I appreciate your romantic notions to the contrary however.

(edited for snark)

Please try to keep the snark to a minimum. Thanks.

[jawngee]

Yes, and I wrote a MIDI sequencer in Borland Delphi in about 1997 and that wasn't particularly challenging either, in fact simpler than attempting similar in SuperCard: http://www.sonicspot.com/aliendiskosystems/aliendiskosystems...

The point is, people tend to gloss and shine and wax poetic about HyperCard and it's ilk, but if it was so profoundly simple and awesome, why aren't SuperCard and related (MetaCard or Toolbook anyone?) prominent development platforms? Because that simplicity becomes complexity once you cross a certain threshold.

> Please try to keep the snark to a minimum. Thanks.

Please keep attempts at editing people's personalities at a minimum. It's how I talk, it's how I write, I make no apologies for it.

Cheers!

[jacques_chester]

The technical qualities of a technology are not the sole determinant of its success or failure.

[asciilifeform]

> I'm not sure what you were doing in 96 or so

I was a boy. A boy playing with Hypercard. As hinted at rather transparently in the article.

> But anything truly useful beyond that was just as complex as anything else.

Complexity of interface is different from complexity back-stage.

[asciilifeform]

Hypercard is different from systems like Director in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.

[arethuza]

Viola was publicly available in '92, when Mosaic came along in early '93 it was pretty clear to people working in the field that although what the Web did was a lot more limited than other hypertext tools the network effect made it infinitely more powerful.