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Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately? I fail to see his point. Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler, and that's part of the reason you have so many amateur apps on the App Store.

Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are talking about a company that was 90 days from bankruptcy when he took over. I think he made a good decision.

If somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard for the Mac, what in the last 13 years has stopped them? It wasn't Jobs.

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> Apple has poured tons of resources into making development for its devices simpler...

"Simple" and "pleasant" are different things. Digging a trench deep enough to bury a car is "simple."

> Has this guy played with Interface Builder lately?

Yes, actually I have played with it.

It makes me want to vomit. The whole NextStep stack does, in fact. Because I have used OpenGenera. And HyperCard.

> if somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard, what in the last 13 years has stopped them?

Here's a example from an unrelated field. The Kalashnikov rifle is more than half a century old. Why has nothing replaced it as the world's most popular weapon of war?

Often, complexity and full-featuredness is precisely what people don't want.

Broken example - the Kalashnikov is still very much available, while HyperCard is at best a historical curiosity. And it _has_ been upgraded to the AK74, which means it's a quarter century. It also has been transformed into the Type 56, the SG550 or the Galil.

Where is that progress with regards to HyperCard?

Mikhail Kalashnikov did not regard the 74 as an improvement. The project was moved forward against his objections.

And HyperCard did indeed end up reincarnated as cheap imitations, just like the Chinese Type 56. The analogy holds.

Can't comment on the other two -- small arms aren't really my field.

  > Mikhail Kalashnikov did not regard the 74 as an
  > improvement.

Does that mean that it really wasn't an improvement? First you argue that popularity defines success, but then you switch gears and appeal to the inventor's opinion.

Seems like the True Scotsman fallacy. If someone had upgraded the HyperCard, but the original creator(s) felt it wasn't an improvement, would you argue that it wasn't a "true HyperCard."

This wasn't meant to be a general statement about the opinions of original creators.

I happen to respect that particular inventor (Kalashnikov). And I agree with the reasons he gave. (Going into them here would be going too far off subject. Google is your friend.)

> If someone had upgraded the HyperCard, but the original creator(s) felt it wasn't an improvement, would you argue that it wasn't a "true HyperCard."

In fact, he implicitly does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCard

Has this guy played with Interfave Builder lately?

This guy writes a lot of well executed but fundamentally vacuous articles; I wrote about a previous one here: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/30/computers-and-network-effects... last year. At this point, PG's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html applies to him. But you wouldn't notice as much from any individual article or submission; it's only through the collection that his tactics become apparent.

I am not a troll. Everything I write is deadly-serious.

And I do not submit my articles to this site, although I do read it when they inevitably end up here. Complain to the person who does.

I think he's more of a crackpot than a troll (and I think the difference matters).

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