[Cuis-dev] Dynabook and education

[Eric Gade]

Hi Todd,

Your message really resonated with me. I was what you'd call a "Hypercard
kid." It was by far my favorite computer program. Though I am a
semi-professional developer today, I came to it late in life because of the
disconnect between my own early experience and what was out there in the
real world. When I tried to study computers officially in school and saw
that they were talking about bits and bytes when I already knew how to make
buttons, windows, drawings, and interactive games, I became completely
deflated.

It's only in recent years after discovering Smalltalk that I realized the
childhood me was actually on the right track and that the outside world has
really lost its way.

All of which is a roundabout (and indulgently biographical) way of saying:
I completely agree. There is nothing like Hypercard in the current world.
One cannot simply make a Hypercard clone: the original fit so holistically
with its mostly offline computing environment, and had almost all the
capabilities of that environment. An equivalent system today would require
new metaphors, interfaces, modes of interaction, and "ways of scripting."

Back during the heyday of OS8/9, I half expected the Finder and other
front-facing GUI parts of the system to be rewritten in Hypercard. Just
imagine: the first line portions of the OS would be inspectable, copyable,
and manipulable to users who wanted to go just "one level deeper." Sadly
that didn't come to pass. But I think the idea is sound -- a compelling
personal computing system should be built of such "layers" that users can
peel back if theyfind their current level of interaction too restrictive,
or if they feel the need to truly go "one level further." Current OSes miss
the mark here. Example: every OS user out there has daily, almost
instinctual interaction and knowledge of buttons. Yet in the main OSes, a
user cannot easily make their own buttons. Of course, we know that they
*could* make their own buttons somehow, but it requires learning a full
fledged programming language, extraneous developer tooling, and an entire
ecosystem of things that are not the system but are used to build the
system. This is, in a sense, completely outrageous. It's like telling
someone you want to learn how to build a table, and they say "learn
physical chemistry and then construct the table with molecules."

I had an idea a couple of years back wherein I would recreate the Platinum
look in one of the Smalltalks (I got 15% of the way there in Morphic -- can
link to repo if interested) and then re-implement Hypercard/Hypertalk atop
it (using this excellent reference implementation/documentation
<https://github.com/defano/wyldcard>). My plan was to then give some kind
of talk where I would demonstrate Hypercard to all the younger CS grads
who've likely never heard of it, let alone seen it, while explaining some
of its advantages and what has been lost in the intervening years. The "big
reveal" would be when I showed them that, in fact, this is not an OS9
emulation, nor a real Hypercard; that if you "peel back" the layer it is
all Smalltalk underneath, and that everything is connected and made out of
the same computing primordial goo. I had imagined I would pop up a morphic
halo or do something else that would have been impossible in true OS9.

Anyway sorry for the long rant. Talk of Hypercard really gets me going!

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 12:03 PM Todd Blanchard via Cuis-dev <
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

> I think HyperCard got closer to this than any other programming
> (authoring) tool.
>
> I was a hard core stack head before I became a professional programmer.  I
> built tons of stacks.
>
> I build a computer system for a blind user (my grandmother) which included
> a number of tools that could
> be used without a mouse or screen (keyboard navigation with audio
> feedback) using a combination of
> prerecorded audio snippets and text to speech (I used the TalkingMoose
> XCMD) and it could access
> dialup services via a serial port XCMD.  I was not yet a trained
> programmer.  I just "made things".
>
> I have never used a more immediate programming environment where cmd-opt
> clicking on any screen element popped open the code
> editor for that element.
>
> I am always hoping to get back to that simplicity and immediacy but
> nothing every quite makes it.
> If you were ever in the HyperCard community, it was mostly amateurs
> building their own tools.
>
> To a large extent, I think web browsers have taken its place but working
> in a web browser is a tangle of files and ugly syntax
> loaded with distracting clutter.  But it is still approachable by
> dedicated amateurs.
>
> On Jun 15, 2020, at 1:09 AM, Hilaire Fernandes via Cuis-dev <
> cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
>
> Nowadays, I'd be interested by someone who has a concept for
> hypermedia live programming (i.e. allowing a computation to start on a
> page, and use that computation context for the following alternatives
> pages in a wiki like setup) even if I think nowadays that teaching
> programming is shortsighted...
>
>
> I think programming is something we are all interested, but we want it to
> be mixed in media as you described it
>
>
> --
> Cuis-dev mailing list
> Cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st
> https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/listinfo/cuis-dev
>


-- 
Eric
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