[Edu-sig] Squeak or HyperCard

[Ian Bicking]

So, after looking over the Shuttleworth Summit notes, in addition to 
notes about plugins and graphics and whatnot, there was also notes about 
HyperCard, but maybe not much discussion.  At least the impression from 
the notes was that Alan Kay thought graphics were essential, but also 
thought HyperCard was important.  I never used HyperCard (only 
HyperStudio, which I get the impression is not nearly as neat), and I 
suspect there are subtle features of it that are not apparent to me. 
But from a technical point of view, I'm also betting it's *much* easier 
to implement the HyperCard environment than the Squeak environment. 
Could it be just as valuable a starting point?

My cynical self thinks the discussion is about graphics and pixels 
because with HyperCard all the hard and highly squishing problems are in 
your face.  There's no big technical hurdles, just the questions about 
how kids interact the computer, what curriculum will be available, etc. 
   All the same problems exist in the Squeak direction, but the 
technical hurdles are bigger so we can chatter about how we put pixels 
to the screen and defer all the truly difficult problems.

And then there's the question: why exactly is HyperCard worthy of 
reimplementation, and what are the essential features?

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org