[swdunlop]

There's no mystery, here. No great conspiracy -- the article has a screenshot of the smoking gun.

http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/hypercard-calc/hc12.jpg

The scripting language had a verbosity and ambiguity that only a lawyer could love. The documentation for that language was similarly impenetrable to anyone with a background in CS, requiring a serious commitment to trial and error to perform operations that were trivial in BASIC.

[Someone]

It looks that way, but it is not that verbose. Compare:

    get name of me
    put the value of the last word of it after card field "lcd"

with

    it = event.target.name
    currentCard.fields["lcd"].append(it.text.asWords().last())

It looks verbose, and in some sense it is, but having lots of implicit state made it a nice environment for what it was.

[sambeau]

That is total conjecture and is not historically accurate. Hypercard was ridiculously popular and widely used amongst people who wouldn't ordinarily program (lawyers, historians, graphic designers etc). Hypercard was not aimed at CS graduates but even when if it was it comes from a time long before CS courses taught Java (And in many cases even C). This kind of verbose, human-readable scripting was exactly the sort of thing that a CS graduate would have experimented with along side the more traditional Pascal and Lisp.