[Edu-sig] Squeak or HyperCard

[Laura Creighton]

>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

When hypercard came out, it was an immediate hit with people who
had never programmed before, to the astonishment of its creators.
I don't think that anybody ever studied these new users of hypercard
to find out what it was about this that made people find it 'easier
to do' than, for instance, programming in Pascal.  Was it the linking?
if so, have wikis and the WWW taken over this particular niche?  Was
it allowing ordinals and cardinals in expressions?  Was it easy
access to a widget library?  I don't know of any research that tried
to answer the question 'why Hypercard?' only the odd bit of anectdotal
reports.  Perhaps the fact that we don't know the answer to your
question is reason enough to reimplement it?

Laura