Part of the genius of HyperCard was that it didn’t take long for someone to learn the whole language and all the things you could do. Once I hit the edges there were a few things I wanted to do that HyperCard didn’t support but I found I could write an XCMD (external command) in Pascal or C to add any feature I wanted. That involved buying a compiler and Inside Macintosh books, and learning a much harder language, but I was so enthused with what I’d created so far that I didn’t want to stop. Each individual XCMD I wanted seemed small enough that it seemed possible to write. Once an XCMD was done it was easy to use and reuse on different projects.

As it turns out, I’m weird, and very few people made that jump to XCMDs and soon I had a full time job writing them. Eventually our products were so XCMD heavy that I started writing Mac apps from scratch in C. It was a nice gradual seduction into programming from the career I was originally trained for.