I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing.
As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.
People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.
And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
analog31 23 hours ago [-]
>>> And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.
By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.
HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.
Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.
j-pb 5 hours ago [-]
I discovered that we got that back in a sense.
If you task an llm with writing a CLI and have it use it, then it hides the "user interface" to a sufficient degree that you can pretty much build any kind of app/functionality in a couple days and it feels "professional".
AI as UI with a somewhat universal affordance.
giantfrog 1 days ago [-]
The Fallout analogy is perfect. Limitation stimulates imagination. I think that’s part of why essentially limitless AI models produce things that are so devoid of it.
temp0826 22 hours ago [-]
Constraints really breed creativity. The demoscene is probably my favorite example of it.
TimTheTinker 6 hours ago [-]
This is why the perpetual obsession with creating new genres in university art departments is so dumb. One told a prospective student (my wife's friend) "we don't do beautiful here" as if that signals erudition.
Real beauty comes from expressing something coherent within constraints such that the constraints become the means of expression.
Tade0 6 hours ago [-]
I was happy to see gen Z art students dropping this sort of snobism when I visited a student art exhibition made for an edition of the Long Night of Museums in my city.
Instead of the usual hideous red, black, grey and white that seemed ubiquitous since at least the 80s along with the most terrible textures one could find, there was blue, yellow, different shades of green.
And one painting featuring an exchange of text messages.
scelerat 23 hours ago [-]
It took browsers and web dev until, IDK, maybe 2010? to match the interactivity and capability of Hypercard circa 1994.
The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.
NetMageSCW 20 hours ago [-]
But nothing like the ease of development since FrontPage until Web Forms and they weren’t as good.
weaksauce 24 hours ago [-]
the original Myst was created using HyperCard... which in and of itself is a crazy app with a huge impact on gaming in general.
watersb 17 hours ago [-]
Cyan shipped at least one Hypercard game, before Myst.
All of Cyan's games were in Hypercard up to Myst. (Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx were the other two.)
Myst ran in Hypercard in early Mac releases but switched to a cross-platform runtime Broderbund built to sell Myst on Windows CDs (and consoles and more).
Riven was also majority designed/prototyped in Hypercard as a development platform, but more directly targeted from the beginning that same runtime Broderbund built for running Myst cross-platform.
cfiggers 21 hours ago [-]
I did not know that!
zahlman 18 hours ago [-]
> too old... to be able to grasp... experience
All you have to do is get people to try using it.
It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.
> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.
And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.
torginus 13 hours ago [-]
I am not quite the right age for hypercard as well, but I did have my chances to interact with a variety of game making tools aimed at kids that were amazing for creating event-driven logic. Likewise in the professional world, tools aimed at business professionals (like MS Access), that kinda were abandoned - and there used to be a whole spectrum of stuff that connected WYSIWIG editors and simple languages to various levels of programming tools.
The demand for this was huge.
mbreese 1 days ago [-]
Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few years ago. These were user developed applications, done by people who may have been a bit technical, but who didn’t to know a full programming language.
If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
jcynix 24 hours ago [-]
I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
sixdimensional 18 hours ago [-]
In the past, we used to refer to these as 4GL systems [1] - and as far as I'm concerned, this is really a wide open field for innovation - especially in the era of AI/LLMs.
Sure. Oracle APEX is popular. You never hear about it on HN because the target user base for low code stuff doesn't overlap with the HN set much, but it's huge.
In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.
There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.
mbreese 5 hours ago [-]
That’s what I’m looking for - low code environments for making quick applications that aren’t sexy, but that are genuinely helpful for a non-technical business. Thanks!
From that link, it seems that Salesforce and Microsoft also have offerings. That doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve seen a bit of MS PowerApps, but generally discounted it as I thought that app should have been a proper DB. Now I’m thinking that I may have been a bit hasty.
pjmlp 24 hours ago [-]
Why past tense, Filemaker and Access are still being sold.
A solution would probably be Airtable.
mbreese 24 hours ago [-]
It’s more that I haven’t really seen many examples of Access or FileMaker applications in the wild for a while. Most of these were CRUD apps that were able to be moved to the web. But that doesn’t mean that typical users are any more capable of navigating hosting setups for modern CRUD web apps.
The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.
But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.
I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)
whartung 23 hours ago [-]
Well thats the crux. While the display may seem simple (a grid, a few controls), a Web UI CRUD app, while routine today, is NOT simple.
While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.
And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.
It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.
You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.
Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".
It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.
NetMageSCW 17 hours ago [-]
Access is included with Microsoft 365, even personal, but there is no web version.
pjmlp 16 hours ago [-]
Microsoft rather pushes PowerApps for the same use cases, when targeting the web.
oidar 20 hours ago [-]
FileMaker is no longer affordable. A single seat is around $500.
jnwatson 17 hours ago [-]
Suggested retail price for Filemaker when it was originally released in 1985 for Macintosh was $195. That's about $600 these days.
It is about as expensive as it ever was.
simondotau 16 hours ago [-]
Which is fair, if FileMaker existed in a vacuum. The inflation-adjusted cost of software and hardware has consistently trended downwards over the past 40 years.
pjmlp 15 hours ago [-]
As someone that pays for commercial software, only if you are talking about race to the bottom on mobile stores.
A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.
simondotau 10 hours ago [-]
In terms of software, commercial quality software is now often free and/or open source. Maybe the best application software is still expensive, but free software is better than anything that existed a two decades ago let alone four decades. The only people deploying Windows Server these days are doing so for legacy reasons, not by choice.
In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo. The latter is many orders of magnitude superior in any metric you could possibly imagine, and it's 1/10th the price in real dollars. Even if you insist on a "serious" laptop it's still 1/4th the price.
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Compaq Portable II (286) $3,500 $10,700
1996 Dell/Gateway Pentium 166 $2,500 $5,300
2006 Dell XPS (Core 2 Duo) $2,200 $3,650
2016 Dell XPS 15 $1,500 $2,100
2026 Dell XPS 14/16 $2,000 $2,000
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Macintosh Plus $2,599 $7,900
1996 Power Macintosh 7200 $2,000 $4,300
2006 20" iMac $1,699 $2,800
2016 13" MacBook Pro $1,699 $2,360
2026 14" MacBook Pro (M5) $1,999 $2,000
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Novell NetWare $3,000 $9,100
1996 Windows NT Server 4.0 $1,100 $2,400
2006 Windows Server 2003 $1,000 $1,660
2016 Windows Server 2016 $900 $1,250
2026 Linux $0 $0
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Early pro NLE systems $50,000 $152,000
1996 Adobe Premiere 4.2 $800 $1,700
2006 Final Cut Pro $1,000 $1,660
2016 Final Cut Pro X $300 $420
2026 Da Vinci Resolve $0 $0
And all of these tables are actually unfair because the newer stuff is way, way, way, way better than any of the older stuff. If we were being fair, the old computers should be absolute top-of-the-line models and the 2016/2026 models should be a Raspberry Pi.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
A Macintosh Plus was only affordable under university student discounts in Portugal, and hardly seen anywhere.
MacBook Neo is a nothing to talk about with its 8 GB and phone motherboard, I specifically mentioned "A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting."
Neo isn't such device, my current hardware has 32 GB.
Your examples miss the relation of salaries, life cost and related percentage to hardware prices, per country.
simondotau 8 hours ago [-]
> A Macintosh Plus was only affordable ...
Exactly my point. Thank you. Computers are so much more affordable now. The remainder of your post seems to be about me mentioning the Neo as an extreme case despite me ultimately ceding to your arbitrary criteria and selecting the M5 MacBook Pro as the point of comparison.
Again, comparing it to a Mac Plus or a 286, or a Pentium 166. Are we even being serious here?
> Neo isn't such device
Absolutely it is, and then some. You're just spoiled by your fancy 32 GB computer because — again, proving my point about affordability — computers are incredibly cheap now and they keep getting cheaper in real terms.
Calling the Neo "throwaway" is an incredibly privileged take. There's no reason to expect it won't have a comparable lifespan to any of the computers listed. It has a fantastic keyboard, comparable to the best laptop keyboards. If you don't agree, that's probably because you don't like laptop keyboards. So don't get a laptop.
You did have one valid point though, the Neo does have a small motherboard. That's unforgivable.
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
Not everyone enjoys FAANG salaries....
Exoristos 23 hours ago [-]
SaaS seems to have largely replaced them. And, needless to say, now LLM.
lysace 22 hours ago [-]
> If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?
There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.
NegativeLatency 24 hours ago [-]
an llm coding agent?
chrisweekly 1 days ago [-]
SQLite seems to me like it fits the bill.
swiftcoder 24 hours ago [-]
SQLite doesn’t have a built-in user interface. The value of something like FileMaker isn’t the underlying storage mechanism, it’s the WYSIWYG user interface building that lets you quickly build custom apps around it
chrisweekly 6 hours ago [-]
(sigh) I was replying to:
>"If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?"
not the rest of the comment. mea culpa for not quoting that specific Q.
Edit: as for the rest of it, I love using Obsidian for ~everything. It's not a database, but it does support queries and rendering of tabular data, which meets all my admittedly modest needs.
(if a true db is required, some ppl like logseq which has some feature overlap w obsidian but is db-driven)
swiftcoder 1 hours ago [-]
Historically the kind of shop that wants a FileMaker/Access replacement does not really want to develop software from scratch. I guess vibe coding may change that equation these days
I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice
tomhow 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks for that audio link. We've added it to the header of this thread, though you'd be welcome to submit it as its own post, perhaps in a few months (to allow time for it to feel fresh again once this thread has vacated the community's memory cache).
It's kind of a shame this uses its own, probably more powerful, language instead of HyperTalk.
HyperTalk is one of the most accessible languages for beginners I've ever seen. Sure it was primitive and had somewhat weak data organization capabilities, but if you're like 6 it's pretty incredible for your experience to be:
1. Open a blank script
2. Drag a field on the screen and name it "myname"
3. Drag a button on the screen, open up it's script and see:
on mouseUp
end mouseUp
4. You then enter the following two lines between those two lines:
ask "What is your name?"
put it into card field myname
5. Then you go back and click the button and a dialog box appears asking your name and when you type it in an hit enter the name appears in the field you created.
That sort of directness is lost in modern development environments. The concept that the button's script lives inside of the button, and in fact everything on the page could have its own script. The page itself also has script, even the stack itself. Your code can of course call code in other objects if need be (typically at the page or stack level), and there is a whole message passing thing happening in the background. It's by far the most intuitive programming environment I've ever seen. It has the kind of immediate impact that helps to save off boredom or feeling like there's too much homework before the fun starts.
In the day people complained about the syntactic sugar in HyperTalk, but I think it was just right for the target audience. They did have more of a point about the difficulty in managing structured data, often having to store things in hidden fields referenced by line and word number or hacks like that.
The most incredible part is this was all in an application that came with the OS. It was the perfect opportunity for a bored kid to randomly come across it and discover a lifelong passion. There was nothing to install, no product to buy first--it was just there, asking to be discovered. And even if your parents weren't about to buy a reference book you could open up other stacks and start reading the code to learn the language. Because most scripts were small and self contained (remember that they were stored at the widget level) this was a legitimate way to understand the basic syntax and keywords.
RodgerTheGreat 3 hours ago [-]
In Decker, most of this example would be similar. The button's default script template would be:
on click do
end
And filling it in with an equivalent script would be something like:
on click do
myname.text:alert["What is your name?" "string"]
end
There is slightly more "programming-language-like" punctuation to Lil than HyperTalk, but simple examples are still simple, and in my opinion having first-class collections (lists, dictionaries, tables) and a richer set of APL-like operators makes Lil scale up much better to more complex programs. As a child I recall struggling tremendously with HyperTalk's "almost-english" structure; it made scripts easy enough to read and understand, but provided very little help when it came to writing new scripts.
Decker has a similar Widget -> Card -> Deck event bubbling hierarchy to HyperCard, and in my opinion retains much of the same directness and simplicity for simple applications. The differences in approach won't please everyone, but they are all carefully considered, and have been refined over time based on feedback from the user community. Decker is a living, growing platform!
jandrese 2 hours ago [-]
Your example needs to add the part where you put that string into a card field so people can see their work.
But your example also includes a period, a colon, square brackets, and a space where someone might expect a comma. It's going to look a lot more daunting to a first time programmer. Simply knowing when to use a period vs. the colon is not going to be obvious.
RodgerTheGreat 1 hours ago [-]
The alert[] function prompts the user for input. The second "string" argument indicates the prompt will ask for a string, and return it. (alert[] can also ask for other datatypes, like a yes/no "boolean" prompt or a multi-choice selection from a list or dictionary of options.)
The colon (read aloud as "becomes" or "gets") is Lil's assignment operator. That single line,
myname.text:alert["What is your name?" "string"]
prompts for input and then stores the result in a card field. If you wish, you could also write it as:
on click do
name:alert["What is your name?" "string"]
myname.text:name
end
Learning the syntax for calling functions is partially scaffolded by the "Action..." dialog that button widgets offer for constructing simple button scripts with a GUI:
on click do
go["Next" "BoxIn"]
play["sosumi"]
end
Users can rely on the system to write code for them initially, and then slowly dip their toes into more complex compositions. Whereas HyperTalk has custom syntax for almost every programming construct and built-in function or feature, the Lil grammar is simple and uniform. Where symbols appear, they have a single meaning. Decker's "Listener" REPL allows the user to have a back-and-forth "conversation" with the Lil interpreter and see responses juxtaposed with their questions, versus the HyperCard "message box" which shows only user input or a single system response.
Ultimately, every programming language does require some degree of handholding and learning, and that's why Decker comes with dozens of example decks to take apart and study. The user community has also furnished some truly fantastic interactive tutorials:
Never used HyperCard, but from descriptions and screenshots in the article reminds me a lot of Delphi/Pascal/Lazarus IDE’s. Appeal is understandable, because it is so cool to be snore to from a few lines of code to a clickable intractable executable, that is the sort of Feedback loop that I miss in python and go GUI builders that I’ve used previously, and why I keep c inning back to Lazarus.
donohoe 1 days ago [-]
I miss HyperCard and I love projects like this at a nostalgia level - but if you're going to have aspirations that this is useful today (2026) with a real project then its a complete waste of time.
I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
RodgerTheGreat 1 days ago [-]
I use personal applications written in Decker on a daily basis.
We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.
InsideOutSanta 1 days ago [-]
A lot of these modern HyperCard reinterpretations get stuck on the black-and-white aesthetics of the original. That's cool, but it limits how broadly appealing they become. Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product.
A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.
Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
kalleboo 20 hours ago [-]
> Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product
They never hacked color into HyperCard 2 since their plans for HyperCard 3 were too grand - it was going to be a part of QuickTime, so that HyperCard stacks would be multimedia applications delivered as QuickTime movies, including embedding on the web. This was when Apple was spiraling though and it got cut.
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
You said it well. The aesthetic is so much more about building your project within the project itself (like what Jupyter and Marimo did for Python, but more so because you also lay out GUI this way), having built-in components, designing around very simple "multimedia" integrations (push a button and a sound plays! With a single command in the event handler!) etc. than about any of the technical limitations.
To me, a properly modern "Hypercard" would be something like if Marimo and Pygame had a baby, and that baby was IDLE except it didn't suck.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> IDLE except it didn't suck.
Hmm, I put that poorly, and can't edit now. I'm really thinking more about the entire Tkinter stack, and the way that IDLE is used both to demonstrate it and to provide a way to edit the Python code needed to interact with it.
jandrese 4 hours ago [-]
> Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product.
I think the bigger problem was when Apple stopped shipping the Hypercard development environment and instead shipped only Player. Also when they stopped developing or supporting the environment entirely.
They had a really cool thing going, but since it didn't contribute directly to the bottom line corporate had it killed.
andrelaszlo 23 hours ago [-]
Myst was famously built in Hypercard, but they must have worked around the limitations somehow?
i believe they used a modified version of hypercard for myst. their earlier games, like _cosmic osmo_, used vanilla hypercard.
Cyberdog 20 hours ago [-]
In a sense, yes. They used third-party extensions (XCMDs) to HyperCard to add features it didn’t support out of the box, such as full-color support.
kalleboo 20 hours ago [-]
And in the final releases of HyperCard, Apple even bundled a third-party color XCMD in order to pretend that HyperCard supported color. It was really limited though (insert PICT files from disk! change the color of buttons! use the paint tools in color? what are those?)
bawana 19 hours ago [-]
i think supercard supported color.
kalleboo 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah there were a few clones that added color and other features - two are even still around today!
HyperCardSimulator.com lets you make and import stacks anonymously and link to them online. Enjoy!
JKCalhoun 5 hours ago [-]
Engineers of a certain age, sitting around, kicking around ideas for a modern Hypercard… what a great pass-time.
Scripting language? Javascript? Python?
SDL3 for cross-platform rendering, audio…
Should the "cards" just be a subset of HTML?
Etc…
hallole 18 hours ago [-]
Woah, this is something I've wanted for forever! Only, without the "quirky" aspects of its design. I can appreciate the charm, but it does obstruct utility, and this sort of tool -- a super-general digital whiteboard -- would be oh so useful. I never knew of its predecessor, "HyperCard," either, which looks to be essentially what I wish for, only modernized.
josters 1 days ago [-]
This reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder.
I'm using LiveCode for a dozen personal applications (and for just the fun of coding; I'm a retired s/w engineer). It's no longer free, but I started with HyperCard and LiveCode is an excellent replacement, at least for me.
gnodar 18 hours ago [-]
The OpenXTalk community is keeping the open source version alive.
Thanks for letting me know, maybe I need to get back into it. I always enjoyed the speed with which I could prototype new ideas and even get them installed on a phone or tablet.
cure_42 20 hours ago [-]
Decker seems like it would have a lot of potential for e-ink devices like the boox note series and such.
brightstar18 1 days ago [-]
awesome, already love the detailed feature set. one thing I'd love is the option to change themes. for eg. i'd like a more modern theme if i want to create a presentation and send it across. retro is a bit of a cognitive overload on users who are now habitual of navigating a different type of UI.
fastball 1 days ago [-]
If you want the "agentic future" version of this (sorry), tldraw just relased "tldraw offline"[1] which in some ways has a lot of overlap with HyperCard as well.
It is actually definitely yes! You can script with JS. Steve Ruiz demonstrates having an LLM do that for you in his intro video to this "offline" version of tldraw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyENfxgyYA
janci 1 days ago [-]
It seems application state is mainly maintained in the widgets. Reminds me of Delphi. Is there a similar concept for representing state in a well-suited data structures, that can be created and composed visually like the UI widgets?
RodgerTheGreat 1 days ago [-]
Decker heavily emphasizes the concept of "reified data", representing information as tangible entities within a deck.
You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications:
In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.
BoingBoomTschak 23 hours ago [-]
Feels more like jerry-rigged SmallTalk to me. Maybe more like Rebol?
thataccount 1 days ago [-]
Decker is neat. I was in the process of using it the other day, but discovered it did not have much by way of font size adjustment in text fields. You could make a heading, but I didn't see a way to make it bigger or larger than simply being a heading.
RodgerTheGreat 1 days ago [-]
Decker fonts are composed of fixed-size bitmaps. The included example "fonts.deck" has a variety of additional fonts to choose from in various sizes, and an editor:
Ah. That would have been good to know! I was looking mostly in the interface for a font size tweaker of some kind.
huseyinl 1 days ago [-]
The HyperCard legacy lives on! The self-contained single-file HTML export alone makes this a fantastic medium for web zines and indie games, and the dithered aesthetic gives it immediate charm. Looking forward to diving into Lil.
cure_42 20 hours ago [-]
It looks way better than most modern interfaces on e-ink too!
cure_42 20 hours ago [-]
And it seems kinda perfect for e-ink
NoSalt 5 hours ago [-]
Will it run Myst???
carimura 20 hours ago [-]
If I could point to two major influences that directed me towards computer engineering it was Hypercard and BBS's.
madhu_ghalame 16 hours ago [-]
Really love this! Simple idea, powerful execution
philips 1 days ago [-]
Looks awesome! Very oddly super small window for it in iOS safari though.
RodgerTheGreat 1 days ago [-]
Decker prefers integral upscaling. On most browsers, "Decker -> Fullscreen" in the menu (or "app.fullscreen:1" from a script) will enable "stretching", but this feature is not supported by Safari on iPhones last time I tested.
felixding 20 hours ago [-]
Nitpicking:
“classic Mac OS”
not
“classic macOS”
bytesage 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
neet_dev 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wetpaws 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
mempko 21 hours ago [-]
Wait, you are telling me people vibe created apps before LLMs? /s
This is beautiful. I loved Hypercard when I was a kid. If they added networking to it, it would have been superior to web browsers!
Please people, have some joy and stop taking people down a peg for vibe coding apps. Let people have fun again for once.
jandrese 4 hours ago [-]
Being able to load stack pages in from a remote site would be both amazing and a total security nightmare. Hypercard's security model was NOT suitable for that kinda of activity. Hypercard viruses were already a problem back in the 90s, but luckily they were hard to spread so the impact was limited.
2b3a51 6 hours ago [-]
Vibe away. Vibe code like a teenager with leather trousers and a top with zips (punk days).
Just don't put it in production or in a work flow where there could be consequences if (randomly) nondeterministic.
mempko 6 hours ago [-]
corporate mindset.
Rendered at 21:18:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.
People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.
And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.
By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.
HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.
Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.
If you task an llm with writing a CLI and have it use it, then it hides the "user interface" to a sufficient degree that you can pretty much build any kind of app/functionality in a couple days and it feels "professional".
AI as UI with a somewhat universal affordance.
Real beauty comes from expressing something coherent within constraints such that the constraints become the means of expression.
Instead of the usual hideous red, black, grey and white that seemed ubiquitous since at least the 80s along with the most terrible textures one could find, there was blue, yellow, different shades of green.
And one painting featuring an exchange of text messages.
The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole
Myst ran in Hypercard in early Mac releases but switched to a cross-platform runtime Broderbund built to sell Myst on Windows CDs (and consoles and more).
Riven was also majority designed/prototyped in Hypercard as a development platform, but more directly targeted from the beginning that same runtime Broderbund built for running Myst cross-platform.
All you have to do is get people to try using it.
It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.
> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.
And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.
The demand for this was huge.
If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...
https://tiddlywiki.com/
https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/organizations-ww-chose-apex
In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.
There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.
From that link, it seems that Salesforce and Microsoft also have offerings. That doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve seen a bit of MS PowerApps, but generally discounted it as I thought that app should have been a proper DB. Now I’m thinking that I may have been a bit hasty.
A solution would probably be Airtable.
The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.
But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.
I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)
While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.
And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.
It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.
You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.
Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".
It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.
It is about as expensive as it ever was.
A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.
In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo. The latter is many orders of magnitude superior in any metric you could possibly imagine, and it's 1/10th the price in real dollars. Even if you insist on a "serious" laptop it's still 1/4th the price.
And all of these tables are actually unfair because the newer stuff is way, way, way, way better than any of the older stuff. If we were being fair, the old computers should be absolute top-of-the-line models and the 2016/2026 models should be a Raspberry Pi.MacBook Neo is a nothing to talk about with its 8 GB and phone motherboard, I specifically mentioned "A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting."
Neo isn't such device, my current hardware has 32 GB.
Your examples miss the relation of salaries, life cost and related percentage to hardware prices, per country.
Exactly my point. Thank you. Computers are so much more affordable now. The remainder of your post seems to be about me mentioning the Neo as an extreme case despite me ultimately ceding to your arbitrary criteria and selecting the M5 MacBook Pro as the point of comparison.
Again, comparing it to a Mac Plus or a 286, or a Pentium 166. Are we even being serious here?
> Neo isn't such device
Absolutely it is, and then some. You're just spoiled by your fancy 32 GB computer because — again, proving my point about affordability — computers are incredibly cheap now and they keep getting cheaper in real terms.
Calling the Neo "throwaway" is an incredibly privileged take. There's no reason to expect it won't have a comparable lifespan to any of the computers listed. It has a fantastic keyboard, comparable to the best laptop keyboards. If you don't agree, that's probably because you don't like laptop keyboards. So don't get a laptop.
You did have one valid point though, the Neo does have a small motherboard. That's unforgivable.
There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.
>"If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?"
not the rest of the comment. mea culpa for not quoting that specific Q.
Edit: as for the rest of it, I love using Obsidian for ~everything. It's not a database, but it does support queries and rendering of tabular data, which meets all my admittedly modest needs.
(if a true db is required, some ppl like logseq which has some feature overlap w obsidian but is db-driven)
Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)
Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)
Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)
I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice
https://itch.io/t/6632495/decker-programming-tutorials-video...
HyperTalk is one of the most accessible languages for beginners I've ever seen. Sure it was primitive and had somewhat weak data organization capabilities, but if you're like 6 it's pretty incredible for your experience to be:
That sort of directness is lost in modern development environments. The concept that the button's script lives inside of the button, and in fact everything on the page could have its own script. The page itself also has script, even the stack itself. Your code can of course call code in other objects if need be (typically at the page or stack level), and there is a whole message passing thing happening in the background. It's by far the most intuitive programming environment I've ever seen. It has the kind of immediate impact that helps to save off boredom or feeling like there's too much homework before the fun starts.In the day people complained about the syntactic sugar in HyperTalk, but I think it was just right for the target audience. They did have more of a point about the difficulty in managing structured data, often having to store things in hidden fields referenced by line and word number or hacks like that.
The most incredible part is this was all in an application that came with the OS. It was the perfect opportunity for a bored kid to randomly come across it and discover a lifelong passion. There was nothing to install, no product to buy first--it was just there, asking to be discovered. And even if your parents weren't about to buy a reference book you could open up other stacks and start reading the code to learn the language. Because most scripts were small and self contained (remember that they were stored at the widget level) this was a legitimate way to understand the basic syntax and keywords.
Decker has a similar Widget -> Card -> Deck event bubbling hierarchy to HyperCard, and in my opinion retains much of the same directness and simplicity for simple applications. The differences in approach won't please everyone, but they are all carefully considered, and have been refined over time based on feedback from the user community. Decker is a living, growing platform!
But your example also includes a period, a colon, square brackets, and a space where someone might expect a comma. It's going to look a lot more daunting to a first time programmer. Simply knowing when to use a period vs. the colon is not going to be obvious.
The colon (read aloud as "becomes" or "gets") is Lil's assignment operator. That single line,
prompts for input and then stores the result in a card field. If you wish, you could also write it as: Learning the syntax for calling functions is partially scaffolded by the "Action..." dialog that button widgets offer for constructing simple button scripts with a GUI: Users can rely on the system to write code for them initially, and then slowly dip their toes into more complex compositions. Whereas HyperTalk has custom syntax for almost every programming construct and built-in function or feature, the Lil grammar is simple and uniform. Where symbols appear, they have a single meaning. Decker's "Listener" REPL allows the user to have a back-and-forth "conversation" with the Lil interpreter and see responses juxtaposed with their questions, versus the HyperCard "message box" which shows only user input or a single system response.Ultimately, every programming language does require some degree of handholding and learning, and that's why Decker comes with dozens of example decks to take apart and study. The user community has also furnished some truly fantastic interactive tutorials:
https://ahmwma.itch.io/phield-notes
I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker
Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...
We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.
A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.
Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
They never hacked color into HyperCard 2 since their plans for HyperCard 3 were too grand - it was going to be a part of QuickTime, so that HyperCard stacks would be multimedia applications delivered as QuickTime movies, including embedding on the web. This was when Apple was spiraling though and it got cut.
To me, a properly modern "Hypercard" would be something like if Marimo and Pygame had a baby, and that baby was IDLE except it didn't suck.
Hmm, I put that poorly, and can't edit now. I'm really thinking more about the entire Tkinter stack, and the way that IDLE is used both to demonstrate it and to provide a way to edit the Python code needed to interact with it.
I think the bigger problem was when Apple stopped shipping the Hypercard development environment and instead shipped only Player. Also when they stopped developing or supporting the environment entirely.
They had a really cool thing going, but since it didn't contribute directly to the bottom line corporate had it killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
https://www.mackiev.com/hyperstudio/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
Scripting language? Javascript? Python?
SDL3 for cross-platform rendering, audio…
Should the "cards" just be a subset of HTML?
Etc…
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
https://www.openxtalk.org/
[1] https://offline.tldraw.com/
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
Which answer after searching is yes and no:
https://tldraw.dev/docs/driver
You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets
For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html
You can also represent composite data as a series of cards in a deck, or use cards as encapsulated "objects" that you communicate with via events:
http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords
In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.
https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html
We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text:
https://beyondloom.com/decker/hershey.html
“classic Mac OS”
not
“classic macOS”
This is beautiful. I loved Hypercard when I was a kid. If they added networking to it, it would have been superior to web browsers!
Please people, have some joy and stop taking people down a peg for vibe coding apps. Let people have fun again for once.
Just don't put it in production or in a work flow where there could be consequences if (randomly) nondeterministic.