>>> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

the original Myst was created using HyperCard... which in and of itself is a crazy app with a huge impact on gaming in general.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

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.

Why past tense, Filemaker and Access are still being sold.

A solution would probably be Airtable.

SaaS seems to have largely replaced them. And, needless to say, now LLM.

> 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.

an llm coding agent?

SQLite seems to me like it fits the bill.

Thanks, I want to add https://www.arraycast.com/2025/01/04/Decker.html which introduced me to it. I wish more people had exposure to q/k/apl and think this is a great way to do it.

I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice

Most recently, 27 days ago with 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48693273

I use personal applications written in Decker on a daily basis.

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 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.

HyperCardSimulator.com lets you make and import stacks anonymously and link to them online. Enjoy!

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.

Is there a scripting language for this? That was what really differentiated HyperCard and made it a replacement for the never-released MacBasic:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

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:

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.

It looks way better than most modern interfaces on e-ink too!

And it seems kinda perfect for e-ink

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:

https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html

We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text:

https://beyondloom.com/decker/hershey.html

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.