Re:The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Compute...
by jedharris on Saturday January 31, 2015 @03:26PM
(#8977978)
Love your reminiscence. Really captures that awesome moment when the basic idea fully takes hold.
I do wonder why Hypercard's modern clones haven't been more successful. Maybe there are just too many relatively easy interactive environments for any to stand out. For example any browser (with the debugger open) is a pretty amazing interactive graphical development environment -- now with full 3D rendering etc. if you get ambitious.
I have a soft-soft for Hypercard -- it was the first programming I did, back in middle school, on the school computers.
They were those old black-and-white macs with Hypercard, and a variety of stacks. We all knew the trick to turn on author mode (level 5 or something? it's been a while!), and from there you could explore and mess with existing stacks.
I still remember the thrill when I first discovered loops, and that I could write a script that would move a character on the screen in response to keys being held down. Then I discovered if statements, & made enemies that chased the main character. Honestly, I FELT LIKE GOD. I had created life.
No instruction, no books, it was all just poking around.
There's really something magical about an environment like that, and it's sad that we've gotten away from it.
(Maybe minecraft or something is the modern equivalent?)