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Comment by birchy | Hacker News Reader

The scripting language for the Macintosh's rolodex-type database (Hypercard) called "HyperText". I'm not aware of any more natural language scripting tool before or since. I can still write code in it, some two decades later... For example: 'put the first character of the third word of line 5 of card field "sometext" into theChar' or 'put the value of card field "typehere" * 1.25 into theValue'

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When I saw this article in the HN list the first thing I thought of was Hypercard. I started using it a uni to do text analysis for my sociology thesis. I went from knowing nothing to a visual word mapping stack in 2 weeks, my only programming experience prior to that was apple2 machine code and AppleBASIC nearly 10 years prior. With that experience I was employed by the university to renovate their Stacks. Now I do programming everyday, and am constantly nostalgic for the something like the Hypercard experience. I search all the time for language alternatives and as interesting as it is, no languages are as intuitive as HyperTalk. Just as I was telling myself Hypercard could be my career, Apple discontinued it! There were some companies that jumped to 'replicate' it but I suppose they didn't have the genius of the Apple engineers, they weren't the same. Even today I have to build a web app and I'm agonising over having to do a HTML interface and hook up functions and the ajax in javascript and do all the sql for the database, its just so repetitive and boring and hard, not fun. Anyway nice choice.

I was on the HyperCard 2.0 team. I'm also nostalgic for it. It's a shame no one has created anything as simple and useful for generating web pages.

One could argue that things have regressed:

https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529

Agree. For a few years, almost anyone could create a filing system for whatever they were interested in or depended on. An online version would be dope. (I see I called HyperTalk "HyperText". Oops...)

Reading about hypercard/hypertalk, especially the pages devoted to it in whole earth's Signal [0], is one of those things that makes me nostalgic for an era I never experienced.

[0] http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1300/

Though HyperCard itself is long gone, the HyperText language did inspire AppleScript.

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