For those intrigued by HyperCard, there is a modern day descendant that is able to produce standalone software for macs, windows, linux, iOS and Android called LiveCode. It is a joy to use, specially when you’re just building tools for your personal use, more focused in solving your own problems than building the next unicorn thing. Nothing is faster, IMHO, than dragging and droping a bunch of controls, writing some glue script, and scratching some itch. It can (and is) used to ship real products in all platforms. I think it shines in Desktop cross-platform development and for internal tools, those are my preferred use-cases for it.
It looks great to me. Pricey though, and very clearly targeted at devs. The partially unrealised beauty of Hypercard was anyone could use it, and making Stacks didn’t feel like you were making software.
You can actually have it for free. They have an open source GPL version at https://livecode.org/, it is targeted at professional developers but I know a ton of non-developers using it (I used to be a quite active member of their community) and techers in K12 space using it as well so you can still have that feeling of using stacks in HC.
I always use it when I need to transform data for some other stuff I am doing, or to scrape stuff for personal use, or to do some form of batch processing.
A recent example, I was building a little API backend server for a project that is not related to LiveCode, just normal web stuff. It was easier for me to cook up a little stack with buttons, fields and some diagnostics and debug my little server while I was building it than use those generic tools such as insomnia.
Those generic tools are awesome, pretty and powerful, but my own handmade tools, which I create specifically to a given project have the advantage of being tailored to whatever I am building, so they might be ugly but they are my special-purpose tools that help me develop and debug my own projects. There is a lot of developer ergonomics when you can quickly come up with GUI tools to debug whatever you’re doing.
Another example is when I had to do some complex batch renaming of thousand of files. The process involved a little crawler going on disk into the folders, inspecting some configuration files relative to the folders and renaming stuff inside them. I could do this with visual feedback, progress bars, etc…
I am quite bad at design but I am scratching my itches, not selling itch scratchers. My little stacks help me a lot.
For those intrigued by HyperCard, there is a modern day descendant that is able to produce standalone software for macs, windows, linux, iOS and Android called LiveCode. It is a joy to use, specially when you’re just building tools for your personal use, more focused in solving your own problems than building the next unicorn thing. Nothing is faster, IMHO, than dragging and droping a bunch of controls, writing some glue script, and scratching some itch. It can (and is) used to ship real products in all platforms. I think it shines in Desktop cross-platform development and for internal tools, those are my preferred use-cases for it.
It looks great to me. Pricey though, and very clearly targeted at devs. The partially unrealised beauty of Hypercard was anyone could use it, and making Stacks didn’t feel like you were making software.
You can actually have it for free. They have an open source GPL version at https://livecode.org/, it is targeted at professional developers but I know a ton of non-developers using it (I used to be a quite active member of their community) and techers in K12 space using it as well so you can still have that feeling of using stacks in HC.
I’m curious as to what you’ve built with this (just to get an idea of what the sorts of itch-scratching things are easily done with this)
I always use it when I need to transform data for some other stuff I am doing, or to scrape stuff for personal use, or to do some form of batch processing.
A recent example, I was building a little API backend server for a project that is not related to LiveCode, just normal web stuff. It was easier for me to cook up a little stack with buttons, fields and some diagnostics and debug my little server while I was building it than use those generic tools such as insomnia.
Those generic tools are awesome, pretty and powerful, but my own handmade tools, which I create specifically to a given project have the advantage of being tailored to whatever I am building, so they might be ugly but they are my special-purpose tools that help me develop and debug my own projects. There is a lot of developer ergonomics when you can quickly come up with GUI tools to debug whatever you’re doing.
Another example is when I had to do some complex batch renaming of thousand of files. The process involved a little crawler going on disk into the folders, inspecting some configuration files relative to the folders and renaming stuff inside them. I could do this with visual feedback, progress bars, etc…
I am quite bad at design but I am scratching my itches, not selling itch scratchers. My little stacks help me a lot.
So is LiveCode a project of your own then?
No, it is not. I am just one of its users.
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What the hell, @rain1.
Find something kinder to do with your time.
Bringing other people down while adding nothing to the conversation isn’t something we need here.