HyperCard on the Macintosh

Author here. Thanks for sharing this with the HN community. For those wondering if this is worth reading, I've written a click-baity title to entice you, "HyperCard vs. Vibe Coding" (though it's only one very small part of the article, it is discussed)

Really nice walk down memory lane. I remember fidgeting with HyperCard in college. It actually was not released when I got my Mac SE and I had to go back to the campus computer store with a certificate to get the box. It really was the first UI oriented language for the masses, so much it messed up with my mind as I was learning Pascal style programming and this weird notion of resource forks and other minutiae to create a program. So programming was trapped in the realm of the “console” but with HyperCard it was graphical from the beginning. Unfortunately, I had the artistic skills of a rock.

The platform that most makes me think of HyperCard now is not the web but PowerPoint. You can point on objects and they can go to other slides IIRC.

We really haven’t progressed that much more have we?

Author here, I'm glad you enjoyed it. HyperTalk and Pascal are obviously very different beasts, I'm sure it was difficult to context switch between the two! For HyperCard stack developers, that resource fork was kind of a blessing, because we didn't need to wonder, "Where is my data?" It was right there in the stack itself, making it super-portable and easy to share. That comes with all of the downsides you might imagine, as skills and needs increased. But it was also a very welcoming environment for the development-curious.

I never found anything like HyperCard that predated HyperCard; it really did seem to be borne from a special burst of insight. I could be wrong though, because as soon as something is declared "the first" someone invariably finds a earlier protoype from PARC or somewhere.

Presentation software definitely feels similar, especially with its card-and-buttons metaphor. Its intentionality is obviously quite different, but I just did a quick look and it seems like there is VBA scripting available in PowerPoint. Maybe the distance between it and HyperCard isn't the vast gulf I thought. Even if that's the case, then it really only supports your conclusion, "We really haven't progressed that much more." That sense of stagnation gnaws at me, TBH.

Thanks for reading and sharing your story.

Glad to see you're aware of Decker. It addresses a number of the shortcomings of HyperCard that you specifically call out: basic sound editing and recording are built in and can be wired up without custom scripting, "Decks" are portable, and can be saved as standalone self-contained .html files, the script editor has mildly more powerful editing features like block indenting and a REPL, color is paletted, but a first-class feature, and fields can contain true hyperlinks (whose behavior can be freely overridden with scripts).

There's also quite a bit of novel functionality, like easy mechanisms for defining new brushes, new transitional visual effects, and even custom "widgets". Decker has grids and a SQL-like query language for working with bulk data, and a growing ecosystem of libraries and tools. Development is ongoing! The scripting language, Lil, is deliberately unlike HyperTalk, but tries to thread the needle between offering accessibility to beginners and power tools to experts. (It's secretly in the APL family.)

If you give it a chance, I hope you'll find that Decker is much more than a superficial imitation of HyperCard's look and feel.