Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The author seems to attribute malice to the death of Hypercard, something akin to "programmers only stand to lose value if users can help themselves".

I think a far simpler explanation is not that control to the ability to program has been intentionally deprived from users, but rather that the vast majority of users have no wish to have such a tool, and that Steve Jobs recognized this.

I think that some proof of this exists: Excel, Visual Basic (and its formbuilder), Applescript, Autohotkey, etc all exist.

Those tools are all intentionally approachable, as was hypercard, and yet the vast majority of iphone users would not wish to deal with those tools or ecosystems. They would much prefer a company do something called "software development" and give them a working specialized application.

It seems more likely to me that Hypercard was eventually seen as a dead-end, not as a threat to the existence of selling apple software. Sure, you could spend significant effort on building a tool that is powerful for novice users (letting beginners create basic automation and forms easily), but less powerful for experts (providing less powerful design, abstraction, and programming features than more typical programming languages).

I think this is more of a cultural shift than anything. Americans in particular used to be tinkerers and makers to a much greater degree. While admittedly many of these examples are influenced by gender roles, it was much more common than today for a mid-century American man to be a tinkerer and handyman who might work on his car in his own garage, do his own home maintenance, and stuff like that. HyperCard and the early days of personal computers arrived at the tail end of this era, where it seemed perfectly natural for "owning a computer" to naturally entail "doing basic computer programming" in much the same way as owning a house, car, or motorcycle entailed doing basic work that entailed having some understanding of the thing. (One complaint you hear about cars these days is that you can't just work on them in your own garage anymore!)

America today is a mass consumer culture where people by and large don't really do that kind of work. Contra Heinlein, Americans today are increasingly specialized insects, less likely to even cook their own meals let alone write a HyperCard stack to manage their recipes. It's in the culture even more broadly than anything Apple might do.

It's not hard to see Apple as making the problem worse instead of better. Apple loves hardware designs that make it impossible to take the machine apart, for instance. Steve Jobs always had that bias--compare the original Macintosh 128K to the Macintosh II, for instance. Even HyperCard itself only came out after Steve left and the hackers briefly took over. And I get it, because a platform that allows for tinkerers and dilettantes is never going to be as beautiful and elegant as a something that was thoughtfully designed from a single perspective; just think back to MySpace or Geocities. But it also makes people dumber in the practical sense of being less capable of changing, repairing, and fully comprehending the world around them.

It was apparently gone before Jobs got back, but the same point still stands. The people who put together accounting systems and the like in Hypercard were unusual in being willing (and having the time) to put forth the effort of building anything complex. They're almost certainly the same people who would have put something together in GW-Basic, because they needed what they were building.

I'm a professional programmer, and I've got enough in my plate to be happy to let clients build some portion of things. But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway.

It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation.

Back when everything was on paper, a technology virtually everyone could access by reading and writing (or typing), lots of people still had specialized jobs based around creating and organizing documents within organizations. Hell, most people are perfectly able to clean and vacuum, but beyond a certain size of 9-to-5 organisation, places hire janitors.

> But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway.

Did you interface with the individual workers, or company as a whole? My experience is that usually, the software doesn't let workers do what they need, the workers end up working around it with Excel, and at some point information will trickle down through two departments and three layers of managers that some piece of software they're paying for needs adjustment.

> It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation.

Exactly. But their jobs are almost never correctly captured by software, so people get creative and invent their own workarounds. The unending popularity of Excel is a great example of this. Asking someone else to fix your software for you has large communications cost and time delay; asking programmers has also a large monetary cost.

My experience is that

And mine isn't. Among some of our clients, being able to do anything in Excel is an unusual skill. Among others, they do nothing more than basic spreadsheet work, using nothing more advanced than cross-sheet references. In twenty years of this job, I haven't run into any of the fabled Excel spreadsheet apps. I'm sure they're out there, but I'm also sure there's plenty of the world that doesn't use them.

I would agree with you and say you can even go further on how people avoid approachable tools. People were asking for something "easier" than HyperCard. Customizing software, rather than learning and programming. Something like HyperStudio "Express" instead of HyperCard. I'm guessing this is why wizards (in Word) also became popular. Though they were meant to teach people concepts, but people ended up using them to avoid learning concepts.

16:38 of this video gives more details of that time when companies started dumbing down things to fulfill customer demand: https://youtu.be/9nd9DwCdQR0?t=998

(The presenters are associated with VPRI, Alan Kay's institute.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com