While Jobs was enamored with the aesthetics of a GUI, I doubt he fully grasped the potential of object-oriented programming, (though the programmers at Apple most certainly did, it was relegated to the 'nerd' level, content with it being attached to traditional languages and their derivatives - Pascal & C.)
At least Dan Winkler's team had a different vision with Hypertalk. An OOP language for the rest of us.
I always felt Jobs missed an obvious opportunity by not incorporating Hypercard into MacOS ala smallTalk with the Xerox Alto. There was discussion of doing this, but Jobs made a poor decision and eventually canned the whole program. Not everything he did was "visionary".
Anytime I want to write a quick program for my linux system, I have to decide on which gui framework to use. And they all have big issues.
95% of my time is dealing with the issues - which change with each update and 5% is actually writing code to solve my problem du jour. I've resolved to writing things in the terminal with ncurses now (least common denominator. Screw all the gui idiosyncrasies and especially bugs.
Hypercard was THE answer. We could do something quick and dirty working just with graphic interface, or use Hypertalk if we needed something more sophisticated, or write an XCMD or XFNC in C or assem. if we needed more in capability or speed. Never having to deal with the Mac's graphic subsytem. It could have morphed into being the finder and the core interface for the Mac ala smalltalk. But Jobs was never a programmer's visionary. I would buy a Mac today, IF it came with a modern Hypercard. But it would probably be bogged down with so much baggage that it would be unrecognizable.
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While Jobs was enamored with the aesthetics of a GUI, I doubt he fully grasped the potential of object-oriented programming, (though the programmers at Apple most certainly did, it was relegated to the 'nerd' level, content with it being attached to traditional languages and their derivatives - Pascal & C.) At least Dan Winkler's team had a different vision with Hypertalk. An OOP language for the rest of us.
Nothing to stop Apple from making this happen today. But sadly, this kind of innovation has long left the company.
I always felt Jobs missed an obvious opportunity by not incorporating Hypercard into MacOS ala smallTalk with the Xerox Alto. There was discussion of doing this, but Jobs made a poor decision and eventually canned the whole program. Not everything he did was "visionary".
Anytime I want to write a quick program for my linux system, I have to decide on which gui framework to use. And they all have big issues. 95% of my time is dealing with the issues - which change with each update and 5% is actually writing code to solve my problem du jour. I've resolved to writing things in the terminal with ncurses now (least common denominator. Screw all the gui idiosyncrasies and especially bugs.
Hypercard was THE answer. We could do something quick and dirty working just with graphic interface, or use Hypertalk if we needed something more sophisticated, or write an XCMD or XFNC in C or assem. if we needed more in capability or speed. Never having to deal with the Mac's graphic subsytem. It could have morphed into being the finder and the core interface for the Mac ala smalltalk. But Jobs was never a programmer's visionary. I would buy a Mac today, IF it came with a modern Hypercard. But it would probably be bogged down with so much baggage that it would be unrecognizable.