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Re:The Hypercard Legacy by microtherion on Friday October 31, 2014 @01:00PM (#8539785)
Some people used to call HyperTalk “Visual COBOL”
Re:The Hypercard Legacy by Animats on Friday October 31, 2014 @02:01PM (#8540142)
Yes. You can write statements which are both valid HyperTalk and COBOL. This is not a good thing.

It went downhill from there:

Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71

You could name fields, but it went visibly slower if you did.

There's visual programing, where you drag boxes around and connect them. This comes back every few years. Simple examples look great. Larger program are awful. Blender, the animation system, has a game development system like that. Programs are single huge, messy wiring diagrams. Programming requires lots of zooming and scrolling.

There's a reason that IC designers gave up schematics for VHDL.

Re:The Hypercard Legacy by jcl on Friday October 31, 2014 @05:21PM (#8541196)
If you want to see programming-as-carefully-formatted-English taken to the extreme, check out Inform 7, a system for writing interactive fiction. For example, here is the complete source of a game:

http://inform7.com/learn/eg/glass/source.txt

Re:The Hypercard Legacy by rspeer on Friday October 31, 2014 @11:29PM (#8542098)
Anyone remember the cryptic document that _why posted in the form of a printer spool [1], years after his disappearance from programming? It was a sort of fictional, surrealist autobiography.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-s...

I was grinning madly when I noticed -- in the part where he's exploring an island -- the page written in syntactically valid Inform 7.

Re:The Hypercard Legacy by e12e on Saturday November 01, 2014 @12:14AM (#8542172)
Assuming:

    > Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71
Means (Pascalish pseudocode):

    > Card71[5] := card54[2]
Or, perhaps a likely C adoption:

     > cards[71][5] = cards[54][2]
I'm not so sure I think your example demonstrate how "bad" this is.
Re:The Hypercard Legacy by raintrees on Friday October 31, 2014 @02:51PM (#8540433)
Borland's ObjectVision had me jump into a rabbit hole for awhile, until I retreated back into (pre-Visual) FoxPro, as I kept running into limitations of the ObjectVision language.