What is the modern-day equivalent to HyperCard?

5 points by chrisco255 ↗ HN
Went down an internet rabbit hole and stumbled across Hypercard earlier today.

HyperCard, for those unfamiliar, was an early Macintosh software offering that sought to make interactive application development accessible to non-technical users. It combined a flat-file database with a GUI. It used the skeuomorphic paradigm of "cards" in a stack to represent the visual state and the navigation flow within a user-defined app. Using the editor and Paint-like overlay tools, you could drag and drop different elements onto a card, and attach functionality to those by coding in HyperTalk with a "natural language"-like syntax.

Everything was live-edited. So when a user typed in a form that existed on a card, it was saved on the fly in the flat file representing that card or stack of cards. It can be considered an early hypermedia system, predating the web. You could also mix and match cards from different stacks to create new stacks, which seems like a powerful concept.

While I can kind of understand why HyperCard was phased out, I can't think of a modern equivalent that provides this similar, modular functionality. In fact, it seems like the web would be a natural home for such a concept, but I don't know of any mainstream examples. What do you think? What's the modern equivalent to HyperCard?

For reference:

"Why HyperCard was so f*ing Great!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K1C5BZKP3I

HyperCard Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkViT_pp9vk

The Computer Chronicles: HyperCard (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

2 comments

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you're going to hate me for this, but possibly powerpoint. You can script pretty crazy things in it, as it's turing complete.
Maybe you should give Decker a spin: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

It runs on all popular operating systems as well as the web, uses a novel multi-paradigm scripting language, and includes a powerful mechanism for defining re-usable "contraptions" which behave like smaller nested cards.