The point is not that HyperCard itself was so successful, but that HyperCard was was so enabling. Some of the first and best interactive CD-ROMs (remember the age of interactive CD-ROMs?) were HyperCard stacks. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog-a major influence on '80s tech thinkers, including Steve Jobs-was converted into a 9,472-page HyperCard stack. Myst, the breakthrough graphical adventure game, originated as a HyperCard stack. HyperCard "stacks" became a popular medium for creating and sharing homemade software for some a rapid application development (RAD) tool, for others a visual authoring environment. All kinds of Mac owners-administrators, scientific researchers, teachers, game developers, writers, artists-found they could quickly learn to speak it. What it looked like to the user wasn’t much more daunting than stilted English. To this layperson, it seems like an imperative language operating on an object-oriented system. Some people will tell you HyperCard’s HyperTalk was object-oriented others call it procedural.
It was a very modern approach and, just as significantly, it didn’t feel like code. Rather than standalone sequences of commands that you could run on the system like macros, HyperTalk scripts were code snippets attached to objects and triggered by events. There still isn’t a word to describe it except "HyperCard." Arguably, HyperCard was mostly a database with a form designer, a stateless data repository, and scripting. What’s HyperCard? Back in the '90s, it was how you got stuff done on a Mac when there wasn’t already an application to use. Later, John Gruber (whose Daring Fireball blog is to Apple what BBC Radio 4’s Today show is to British politics) provided a glimmer of hope: "Swift Playgrounds = the new HyperCard?" Sure enough, 45 minutes into the 2016 WWDC keynote, Tim Cook-not an SVP, but Tim himself!-unveiled Swift Playgrounds for iPad, "a new way to learn to code." Because I’d been thinking about it, I had my tweet ready: "I personally think a way to learn Swift is not what the iPad needs-it needs a 21st Century HyperCard. One suggestion was that this could be an iOS version of Playgrounds, the interactive test builder that Apple added to Xcode when launching its new programming language, Swift, in 2014. In the run-up to WWDC, I saw developers on Twitter wishlisting "Xcode for iPad"-a way to write apps on an iOS device rather than in the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) that Apple makes available exclusively for the Mac. For all Apple’s obsessive secrecy, even its senior managers acknowledge with an on-stage wink that much of what they announce these days has already been predicted.
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