Monday, November 30, 2009

From the FROM GOD'S MOUTH TO OUR EARS department:

"I'm especially impressed with the way you've preserved the same feel and flavor of HyperCard even in all the new features you've added and revised... When I finally got to Revolution it was like coming home again... You have created a very worthy successor to HyperCard, the only one I've seen which captures, preserves and seamlessly extends everything I thought was great about the original." -- Dan Winkler

And to think -- we wouldn't even know about this little gem if not for a recently spectacular little flamefest on the Rev use-list. That flamefest partially reignited the debate regarding whether we should be proud of Revolution's Hypercard origins or ashamed. You can read more about Hypercard here. People who are embarrassed by that lineage should just go away and program in C. Seriously. It's snobbery like that (produced in metric boatloads over on a recent /. thread on Rev ) that keeps people, especially normal humans, from even trying to make their own solutions.

From the wikipedia entry above (which is itself ironic given that the first wiki was produced as a Hypercard stack):

HyperTalk was sufficiently popular that one of its main uses was not as a database, but as a programming tool that empowered ordinary computer users. Thousands of "stacks" were written and distributed as "stackware" in the years when HyperCard was widely available. As stated above, programming "for the rest of us", that is, for non-professionals, allowed many thousands of personal applications to be created by individuals with a need for personal software solutions.

You or I are unlikely to make anything super-duper great, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place in the world for "little and gets the job done" ;-)