i would be far more interested in the implicit followup to this piece - a more detailed exploration of why exactly none of the “open source hypercard” attempts have gained traction. it might be true that they are trying to do too much and therefore lose the simplicity and low entry barrier that was hypercard’s major strength, but it is also possible that people expect even toy apps to do a lot more these days, and that therefore hypercard clones have to be more capable than the original was.
tangentially, i am surprised that hypercard gets so much nostalgic geek love and visual basic so little. vb absolutely did nail the “draw up an interface and attach a little piece of code to each element to bring it to life” method of programming; it didn’t scale up to large apps very well but i’m guessing neither did hypercard. perhaps hypercard’s greatest win was dying out before it could be overextended into the kinds of project that vb made painful rather than easy.
i would be far more interested in the implicit followup to this piece - a more detailed exploration of why exactly none of the “open source hypercard” attempts have gained traction. it might be true that they are trying to do too much and therefore lose the simplicity and low entry barrier that was hypercard’s major strength, but it is also possible that people expect even toy apps to do a lot more these days, and that therefore hypercard clones have to be more capable than the original was.
tangentially, i am surprised that hypercard gets so much nostalgic geek love and visual basic so little. vb absolutely did nail the “draw up an interface and attach a little piece of code to each element to bring it to life” method of programming; it didn’t scale up to large apps very well but i’m guessing neither did hypercard. perhaps hypercard’s greatest win was dying out before it could be overextended into the kinds of project that vb made painful rather than easy.