Douglas Adams on Hypercard and new educational models
"<i>It was an incredibly open-ended piece of software, allowing those without much expertise in programming (or even any at all) to build a wide variety of computational tools. To borrow a formulation from Seymour Papert (who co-created the programming language Logo), HyperCard had low floors and high ceilings.</i>"<p>Speaking as someone who used HyperCard to create a couple of applications, this is...somewhat overstated. It was quite good at creating things that resembled flipping through a deck of cards. (One app was a "smart test" that would present a more-or-less difficult question based on the user's previous answers---my first introduction to Bayesian statistics.)<p>It was, however, not a good programming environment if you needed to do anything complex---think of writing a complicated Emacs major mode, not using Emacs lisp but a simplified textual language intended for those without much expertise.<p>This is a general problem for systems built for "those without much expertise in programming (or even any at all)"; they may be able to do simple things, but you'll still need to be a "real programmer" to do slightly more complicated things, and a "real programmer" will be doing it with one hand tied behind their back.