Angela's website -- HyperCard
Angela Brett's
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mathematician by L'hopital's rule, programmer by birth, physicist by sneaking into seminars, linguist by using outdated web development experience to wrangle into a Masters program, writer by the lake

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HyperCard

When I was 14 I got my first Mac. Not long afterwards, I discovered HyperCard Player, and fiddled about wirth it a bit. I copied the full version of HyperCard from the school computers, thinking it was simply a newer version of what I had, but in fact it allows programming HyperCard stacks. I did a lot of HyperCard stuff, ending up with pretty sophisticated metaprogramming type stuff which made me love scripting languages. I wrote some shareware. In the end I realised that HyperCard was in fact commercial software, so, having made more than the purchase price in shareware payments, I bought it... even though my CD-ROM drive was broken at the time so the CD was useless to me.

HyperCard seems a bit like a toy, and indeed it would be a great way for somebody to get into programming as it's easy to create a GUI and do all that sort of instant-gratification stuff... but don't be fooled, HyperTalk can also be pretty powerful as a language. Unfortunately it lacks on what I guess you'd call the library side of things. It stayed stuck in the 80s, with a System 7 interface, and things like colour bolted on afterwards. Then eventually, Apple left it to die. As far as I know, it hasn't quite done so, there are still die-hards out there.

You can see my HyperCard software here.

This page has been accessed times since 2025-05-28 16:42:49 Last updated: 2007-01-28 10:48:28
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