Let Us Now Praise MacroMind Director (fastcompany.com)

Adobe announced last week that it is discontinuing sales of Contribute, and Director, adding that support to Shockwave for Mac will also be stopped in March. Fast Company's editor Harry McCracken ran into Marc Canter, the industry legend who cofounded MacroMind, the company that created Director back in the 1980s. Following is an excerpt from their conversation: I took the opportunity to ask Canter for his thoughts about Director, which was born in the pre-web era when CD-ROMs seemed to be the future. He told me that 85% of the CD-ROMs published in the medium's golden age were assembled using the package. "You'd buy this $800 product and hang a shingle and make multi-millions," he said. Canter also lamented that Director doesn't receive the same appreciation for its pioneering role in interactive content creation as does Apple's HyperCard, which appeared two years after Videoworks and had a much briefer period of relevance. He's right. Even though Director long ago faded away, it gave way to Flash, which was rendered irrelevant by HTML5 -- and it deserves a spot on any list of the most significant foundational technologies of all time.

Comments

Lingo is bizar beyond anybodys imagination.

[Qbertino]

I did my Multimedia Design Diploma in 2001. One big part of the curriculum was building Multimedia Applications in Director. Our class learned programming in Lingo (the programming language of Director). With some teacher who had learned programming in Lingo and thus knew literally less than nothing about programming.
After my training I had a gig for 9 months building SAP simulations with sliced up screenshots and buckets of cobbled-together Lingo code in Director. This was such an kafkaesk thing, you'd barely believe it.

Seriously, if you want to know why Director doesn't get any praise - aside from Adobe screwing things up ... again - look at Lingo. This abysmal disaster of a PL has no equal on this planet. It's basically a programming language designed by people who couldn't really tell the difference between a value and a variable. I'm not joking.

If you think PHP is a mess, you have seen nothing my friend. Lingo takes the cake and wins the battle of bizar 'programming' languages hands down with flying flags, even with RunRevs "Transcript", Typo3s/Neos' "TypoScript" (Don't ask, you don't want to know, seriously now) and older versions of SQL joining the fight.

Director had some nice animation and prototyping/RAD concepts, no doubt. But at a certain point they should've brought some people in who knew what they were doing - you know, like with ActionScript 2 in Flash.
They didn't and Director died a well deserved death.

I'm so glad JavaScript is slowly taking the place of the universal frontend/ui language and, trust me, if you'd've seen Lingo, you would be too.

My 2 cents.