Re: Hypercard Simulator
Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2023 2:16 am
Ahhh.... now I see, this 'Hyper Variety LLC' is Dan Gelder, who produced the righteous, although never released, SERF xTalk/xCard. That makes total sense.
I think this is an idea that's gotten forgotten somewhat — HC was created for 'The Rest of Us", the users, to use. "A solution in search of a problem "— Atkinson. The ability to produce standalone apps didn't even appear in HC until v2.3.5 IIRC. And there was not even any built-in syntax for reading binary files (no 'null' keyword). I'd argue that there are (or were) way more fans of HC/xTalk that never became 'software developers' at all, I didn't (at least I didn't really try to be).
Yes, 36 years is a long time, but since HC was officially shelved by Jobs more than two decades ago, I find it impressive that there are still as many fans as there are, and I'm specially amazed that there seems to be a younger, a bit retro-obsessed crowd that have gotten into it the idea more recently.
I do think the time is now to move xTalk/xCard onto the web (with the help of HTML5) where it should have been as soon as the masses started to have internet in the early-mid 1990s. I'll say it again, while I really like the offline/bare-metal/OS APIs access of a 'native' engine, I do believe that this sort of xTalk/JS transpiring thing would be THE best path for xTalk going forward, for reasons such as the low-cost of maintaining (since 'huge-corp' does the bulk of 'Engine'/Platform developing) and platform agnosticism. With a 'native' wrapper such as Electron, it could have access to the whole Node.js ecosystem (and therefore some of that bare-metal goodness).
HyperCard and some that followed weren't really created for software developers were they?FourthWorld wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 6:37 pm Of the estimated 27 million software developers around the world today, what percentage would identify as HC fans?
Would the percentage who would even know what it is be higher than 5%?
A lot's happened in 36 years.
I think this is an idea that's gotten forgotten somewhat — HC was created for 'The Rest of Us", the users, to use. "A solution in search of a problem "— Atkinson. The ability to produce standalone apps didn't even appear in HC until v2.3.5 IIRC. And there was not even any built-in syntax for reading binary files (no 'null' keyword). I'd argue that there are (or were) way more fans of HC/xTalk that never became 'software developers' at all, I didn't (at least I didn't really try to be).
Yes, 36 years is a long time, but since HC was officially shelved by Jobs more than two decades ago, I find it impressive that there are still as many fans as there are, and I'm specially amazed that there seems to be a younger, a bit retro-obsessed crowd that have gotten into it the idea more recently.
I do think the time is now to move xTalk/xCard onto the web (with the help of HTML5) where it should have been as soon as the masses started to have internet in the early-mid 1990s. I'll say it again, while I really like the offline/bare-metal/OS APIs access of a 'native' engine, I do believe that this sort of xTalk/JS transpiring thing would be THE best path for xTalk going forward, for reasons such as the low-cost of maintaining (since 'huge-corp' does the bulk of 'Engine'/Platform developing) and platform agnosticism. With a 'native' wrapper such as Electron, it could have access to the whole Node.js ecosystem (and therefore some of that bare-metal goodness).