HyperCard Forgotten, but Not Gone
A formal language that sounds like
(which is actually goodbye = hello.lines[3].words[1]) is ridiculous. The HyperCard phenomenon though is something that should be researched by psychologists, because I myself, too, saw it many times how a complete non-techie gets something working in an hour or two. They get it quickly and "amazing" is just not the word. No other programming tool is as good at that as HyperCard.Put the first word of the third line of field "hello" into field "goodbye"And like the rest of the old good Apple stuff HyperCard can be traced back to Xerox PARC: that's NoteCards, a Lisp-based hyper-text system, according to Wikipedia.
Not trolling, but just asking a serious question. If HyperCard was the bee knees, why doesn't some make an open source version of it?
"Before HyperCard, programming was more or less the exclusive domain of professional programmers."
I loved HyperCard (still have some of the reference books on my shelf in case it does come back) but a statement like this is way off base. Tens of thousands of non-professional students and enthusiasts were writing and sharing BASIC programs long before HyperCard and Turbo Pascal was a huge sensation at the time.
My first formal programming class was a summer school (grade-school) experience using HyperCard so I have a sentimental spot for Hypercard Stacks. I remember being wow'd by the demos on the Mac SE.