The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
Hypercard remains extraordinary. It anticipated the web, but have a taste of its <i>scripting language</i>:<p><pre><code>    if the number of chars in field "Customer Code" is not 7 then
      ask "Please type in the 7-letter customer code"
      put it into field "Customer Code"
    end if
</code></pre>
This is a <i>real language</i>! 'ask' pops up a modal dialog. 'it' is a special identifier meaning "the last result", like Perl's context variables.<p>But what is most lovely about this language is that it focused on users. As a user you could drag out a button, then double click and write some Hypertalk scripting. It was part of a vision where computing would empower amateurs to become desktop publishers or artists or programmers or...<p>The web captured that magic for a time, when it was about HTML with light JS. But the modern web has advanced beyond the amateur.