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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't done so recently, but for some time I would look at the latest Mac development tools. They were always just too forbidding. "Hello world" can't require 1000 lines of code, or several pages of instructions to get it working.

Hypercard was a breath of fresh air. Not only could I write useful programs quickly, but I could share them with others, with little risk of mishap. I even wrote software to control rudimentary hardware gadgets using a couple of code resources that I wrote in Pascal.

Today, the point may be moot if Python and Javascript work well enough on a Mac.

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That's the thing. In the late 90s if I wanted to make a GUI application that could do a large share of what the overall computing system could do, I had Hypercard. And one didn't even need to study, exactly: all stacks were inspectable and therefore examples of themselves, and examples for learners. You could copy and paste buttons in context. Hypertalk was designed to be easily read (rather than written). Today if a regular user wants to make even a simple GUI, they need to learn a full-fledged programming language just to get started. What a shame!

The last version of HyperCard that was released in 1995 and it was never made PPC native.

VB.Net is still pretty easy.

> if Python and Javascript work well enough on a Mac.

They absolutely do not. Even getting started with a GUI app is a major undertaking in either one of those ecosystems.

And that term "ecosystem" indicates the problem, HyperCard was an application for making applications when "application" was just a fancy word for a program with a GUI. Nobody wants to download and learn an ecosystem just to build an app. There should be an app for that, but there's not. We don't have app-building apps on every iPhone because Apple chose not to put app-building apps on every iPhone. It's not hard to see why.

On Android, the closest thing to an "app building app" is Tasker. It's meant for end-user automation, scripting without much typing, but it's powerful enough to build whole GUI apps (and it wisely offers an option to export such creations as standalone .apks).

It's definitely not Hypercard, but it shares its spirit, and is still a very useful thing. Like, e.g. last weekend I though I'd like to run a sampling profiler on myself - i.e. every now and then pop up a notification to record what I'm doing at any given moment, and store that data in a format I could later use for analysis. I managed to build one in 30 minutes in Tasker - complete with showing the list on a smartwatch and recording to CSV; after first spending the same amount of time looking for existing solutions and failing to find any. That's to show how easy it is to do, straight on your smartphone. It's something you could easily do on a bus or a train - and more importantly, it's something a regular non-tech person could do too.

FYI, there is an existing solution that does pretty much what you describe: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bsoule.tagtime...

Thanks. Interesting, looks like it's being developed by the Beeminder people. I probably would've given it a go if I found it (discoverability of PlayStore sucks), but now my 30-minutes solution is actually more feature-full than this (in particular, it works on a smartwatch).

Ooh, any way we could entice you to describe that in the TagTime forum? https://forum.beeminder.com/c/tagtime

Thanks. This is fascinating.

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