Hacker News Reader

Comment by CaliforniaKarl | Hacker News Reader

HyperTalk was the first programming language I ever learned. Now I understand how each card was an object that I was manipulating.

It was so good! It's too bad it never became more popular and disappeared.

View on HN

It was also a great introduction to event based programming e.g. attaching HyperTalk scripts to 'on mouseUp'.

As an avid HyperCard user one of the problems was you couldn't extend it with new UI components. I did write an XCMD (C code to extend HyperCard) but there was no way to visualise new stuff, I understand it was because of the highly optimised code by Bill Atkinson. The extensibility is probably why Visual Basic took off.

Ah, that was Flash 5 for me. I remember convincing my dad to buy me the boxed copy, which was something like $199 back then (2000), which was quite a bit of money. I remember how ActionScript was a Big Deal and how I'd hang out on Newgrounds, DeviantArt, CGTalk, etc with some geeky kids from school who were also into design (though we didn't call it that at the time, it was just general middle school dorkery and computer stuff). JavaScript was a dark art back then, ActiveX was cool, and free hosting accounts like FortuneCity and Homestead were what we had to work with. The lame kids used Tripod and GeoCities, but we were cool with our .TK domain names. ActiveWorlds was the future, DJing was our future profession, and Quake 3 over hacked Netzero without the toolbar was the way we took our deathmatch. The MS IntelliMouse Optical was what you used if you were REALLY cool, along with a Trinitron monitor and Altec Lansing POWERED speakers WITH A SUBWOOFER. We eventually got CABLE MODEM and that blew our minds again. Suddenly we could FTP FreeBSD images down without waiting overnight.

Ah, the good old days.

I remember saving up to buy a second-hand 21" Trinitron monitor back in... 2002? Damn, that was the shit! I found that so cool! I still sometimes wonder if i should find a Trinitron somewhere, just for nostalgia's sake.

Isn't "no HyperCard for Windows" another likely reason?

WindowScript was a popular XCMD that would let you open multiple windows with native controls (which is how many stacks added color support long before HyperCard did).

> Now I understand how each card was an object

And inheritance too! Every card inherits from its background. It was basically OOP.

oop it was not. perhaps prototypical.

If you don't think prototype programming is OO, your definition of OO is remarkably restrictive (and in my opinion wrong.)

I'd suggest reading up on Self -- or Smalltalk-72 for that matter.

My first OO programming language was the 'MOO' language used in the online LambdaMOO text-'VR' worlds.

I wish I could go back 10 years old playing with HyperCard with understanding I have now!

What's stopping you?

I also made a handful of things with Hypercard. A very impressive program. I'd say it was killed by a combination of Steve Jobs' desire to turn Macs into appliances and the web.

It's still around:

https://livecode.com/

They used to have a really perplexing pricing model, but I think you can use it for home now mostly unrestricted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com