I'm just going to talk about Hypercard again for a bit.

It frustrates me to no end that the only way to run hypercard stacks today is to boot a Mac Classic emulator, and the load the stack in to hypercard in the emulator.

AFAIK, the whole thing was interpreted. We should be able to write a hypercard player for any platform.

Hypercard was a tool for Non-programmers to make programs.

The things that were made in hypercard are pretty simple, all things considered, but they could look and feel very polished, and it was way ahead of a lot of other tools in that regard.

If you've never used it, think of Hypercard as Powerpoint with functions and variable.

Hypercard could be used to build full applications. Things that looked liked Native MacOS apps.

Douglas Adams wrote this app for calculating the volume of the nest of some bird I've never seen: https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode

But beyond calculating the volume of the nests of obscure birds, Hypercard could be used to stitch together applications that did pretty much anything.

Myst was built in Hypercard, for example. But so were hundreds of other games and programs by amateurs.

The point of hypercard was that it was accessible to people who were not developers. Anyone could reasonably build something with this tool.

Most people that I've spoken to about it said that it felt to them like the future.

And we let it die.

It doesn't exist anymore. Even accessing things that were written with it takes an unreasonable amount of effort.

It is entirely unreasonable that these labors be lost today, but they are. (We are shitty stewards of history.)

Lots of companies out there, and a few open source projects, have tried to bring Hypercard back to the world.

Livecode is a pretty decent example. Their platform is pretty easy to use, and you can make some cool apps that are crossplatform with it. iOS, Android, Web, whatever. There's even an Open Source version.

But live code is still way more complicated than hypercard ever was. As a developer, I find it limiting. As a hobbyist, I find it needlessly complex.

All the big open source projects tend to suffer from the same kind of feature creep. Or, not even feature creep. It's not that they end up too complex, it's that they start that way.

These aren't tools built for users, to make it easy for a user to make things. These are tools built for developers, to make it less painful to do the stuff they don't like doing.

That's fine, I guess, but that's not what made hypercard special.