1cg wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 6:33 pm
The tricky thing is that the glory of HyperCard and descendants was always the all-in-one developer experience, which goes against the grain of the current web development world. I think there is a lot of opportunity there, however, since web development has managed to make itself so darned hard with react and all the front end madness.
Will be interested to watch, and thank you for the warm welcome!
I don't know... I think the biggest draw for me, as a teen in the late 1980s, was the instant gratification aspect. Your are working on an app while you are running that app! Some modern dev app engines are just coming back around to this. When I see "Live Reload" advertised as a desirable feature I think 'HyperCard was "Constantly Reloaded" more than three decades ago'!
And the easy to read and understand (even if you aren't good at commenting your work) HyperTalk/xTalk script was/is a no brainer! The idea to use a message queue with a message hierarchy makes total sense for an app engine where things are driven by user generated events. It really made instant sense to me the way it works. And it made sense to a lot of non-programmers... artist, musicians, fans, collectors, kids, etc. Democratized programming by making it so anyone with an idea, with a little work, could produce an app.
And most of all the extensibility... AppleScript, XCMDs/XFCNS / Externals, and now days "Builder Extensions" means hardware level access to the computer (certificates, code signing, entitlements, etc. aside). You can do just about anything with it! As a hobbyist musician with a long time interest in MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interfaces), hardware accesss is pretty much a requirement for me, and one that can't easily be achieved on the web (of course there is client side Node.js or React Native and the like, but on web with WebMIDI you need a extension to access the hardware).
The names are different, call it an NSView, call it a page or form, or stack/card, but they're all chunks of data / controls displayed in a window or screen. Nothing has really changed all that much, in any real monumental way since the late 80s, if you think about it. Apps are still apps. It doesn't really matter what the underlying app engine is, accept to knowing its limitations.