Comment Re:Long live Hypercard (Score 1) 578
Precisely!
One only needs to look at what was done in Hypercard to see that this will actually be useful to many people, especially with modern hardware underneath it.
It will be used for inappropriately complex systems, of course, but so it goes. Many people will find it's wonderful for the problem they want to solve, for which they'd never hire a "real" programmer.
When I was designing a scripting language for testing wireless protocols I modeled parts of it on Hypertalk -- I allowed programmers to use either message[id] or 'id of message', for instance. It wasn't particularly fast, compared to what one could do in C, but it was certainly more usable by someone who understood the domain but wasn't a programmer.
The testers found it very useful. The people writing the protocols weren't interested in using it to produce realtime efficient implementations, but nobody expected it to be used that way. I was surprised to find some testers, who were also programmers, using it to write load generating tests, though.
Very few people need to extract every bit of efficiency out of a dual core CPU in order to manage their model railroad and train collection, or their knitting pattern collection, but the relatively inexpensive computer they might buy will certainly have such a CPU in the near future. Such a machine will run such an application very satisfactorily, and they'll be able to make it do just what they want.
Go find a copy of Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook and see how well it explained how to use the language. People did great things with it -- but they weren't interested in writing operating systems.
joe