Angela's website -- HyperCard
Angela Brett's
disintegrated biscuit (that's the way the cookie crumbles)


mathematician by numbers, programmer by night, physicist by gedankenexperiment, linguist by 2017, writer by the late Audrey C. Luckens' standards

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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 2024-05-02 10:26:20 Last updated: 2007-01-28 10:48:28
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