Re:William Cook has died
by mitchbob on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:20PM
(#29434834)
Sad to hear. I wrote the original AppleScript documentation and worked closely with William and Warren and the rest of the AppleScript team. It was one of the few teams I worked with in Silicon Valley that had a real sense of community, with regular outings to our favorite taqueria in Mt. View and that great Indian restaurant in the Sunnyvale strip mall, and also impromptu music sessions with William on guitar. He was a great guy who died much too young.
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Re:William Cook has died
by KennyBlanken on Friday December 03, 2021 @10:32PM
(#29438454)
Did you work on Hyperscript? Hyperscript is near and dear to me as it was what my college used for the intro to algorithms CS class.
Genius, really - such an easy to read/understand/use language really freed the professors to teach algorithms, not programming mechanics. And that shit was object-oriented!
It was funny how often our professor would answer "how do I use hypertalk to do ___" with "just write it out" and how often it would work.
I didn't work on HyperTalk, but Kevin Calhoun, who worked on HyperCard 2.0 and 3.0, was just around the corner. AppleScript was spun out of a wildly ambitious project spearheaded by Larry Tesler, the head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group, to make end-user programming a reality, but HyperCard and HyperTalk were arguably far more approachable and productive for end users. And in the end it was AppleScript that survived the internal politics while HC/HT were killed.