Closer To The Ideal

(In this post, I will let hecl stand in for all scripting languages that aim to make programming easy to do on cell phones.)

All through the 1980s and for most of the 1990s, Apple made efforts to make programming easy. In 1987, Apple released Hypercard, probably the single easiest programming environment ever. Apple’s dedication to empowering people – allowing minimally-technical people to program – earned it a great deal of goodwill, so much so that Bill Atkinson (the inventor of HyperCard) basically gave it to Apple as a free gift, in exchange for the promise that it would be included on all Macintosh computers. Sadly, in this decade, Apple has forgotten about Hypercard. My sense is that this represents a larger trend within Apple: a general retreat from the goal of giving minimally-technical people easy programming tools. The death of Hypercard lead to mourning among its many fans (myself included). Danny Goodman summed up the feelings of many:

I shed my buckets of tears for HyperCard (and what might have been) many, many years ago. The first crude demo that Bill showed me was, at its root, what the World Wide Web has become. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Despite valiant post-version 1.1 efforts by dedicated and exceptionally bright serfs (their recollection brings fond memories), HyperCard never truly recovered from its detour to the Claris dungeon and the dungeon masters. It’s a tale of perhaps the biggest opportunity Apple missed in its self-defense against a rising Windows tide.

When I look at the current product, I see facets that are still ahead of their time, not the least of which is the extraordinarily elegant HyperTalk language by Dan Winkler — a kid straight out of college, who Bill Atkinson said was the only programmer who could keep up with him. At the same time, aspects of the product have been embarrassingly behind the times for years. Kevin was well on his way to fixing that, but the scenery changed.

Back when Apple was still proud of HyperCard, and boastful of its use by minimally-technical people, this is the kind of article that I read over and over and over again:

I thought it was really cool to see – not because I’m interested in quilting, or the program is anything brilliant (it’s simple and functional), but because enabling stuff like this is part of what I built Hecl for: to make mobile phone applications easier, quicker, and simpler to create. Someone went and typed in the code on Heclbuilder, got the program running, and now a number of people have a handy tool to do some calculations for their hobby, which is a heck of a lot easier than fooling around with SDK’s, Eclipse or Netbeans, and so on and so forth.

But this is no longer Apple talking, rather, it is David Welton, talking about Hecl.

The other tool for programming by minimally-technical people that Apple has promoted has been AppleScript. Influenced by HyperTalk (HyperCard’s programming language), Applescript has a syntax that in many ways mimics English, and therefore it is easy for English speakers to learn.

The digital revolution continues to change our lives. The biggest change over the last few years has been the mass acceptance of cell phones. Most people that I know no longer have landlines, they only have cell phones. This is the next great frontier for computer programming. And yet, Apple hasn’t yet made Applescript available to run on the iPhone. Yet hecl can run on Android.

Personally, I would love to be able to write apps for the iPhone. But I don’t want to have to learn the Object C language. I don’t have the time. I agree with Simon Brocklehurst’s criticism of this decision:

Recently, Apple bowed to the inevitable, and has released an SDK for developer testing. The language they chose to base the SDK around is Objective-C. This wasn’t a complete surprise – after all, it’s the “native” language of Mac OS X. However, while it’s not a surprise, I wonder if it’s not a major strategic error on Apple’s part. The point is this: the Mac is a niche platform, and is especially niche in terms of numbers of developers building applications in Objective-C. Compare that to iPhone, which because of its technological lead, has the chance to become a major volume player in the mobile phone space. If Apple wants iPhone to succeed, it seems strange to attempt to force developers to use an unpopular language for programming it. That isn’t the way to win – developers have many, many choices of platforms they can spend time developing for.

Brocklehurst thinks Apple should pick a popular language for its SDK. I think Apple should pick one that is easy to learn. A light weight scripting language. If Apple came out with an implementation of Applescript that ran on the iPhone, then I would start writing iPhone apps tomorrow.

But for now, it doesn’t seem like Apple is planning on doing that. So when I look around for relatively easy ways to get into cell phone programing, other light-weight scripting languages jump out at me. And they lead me to platforms other than the iPhone.

So maybe hecl is the new Applescript/Hypercard? For people who want to put together a quilting site with a cell phone connection, what is the easiest way for them to do that? Who is, right now, showing commitment to the old ideal of empowering minimally-technical people to write the apps that they want?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 8:46 pm and is filed under apple, applescript, cell phones, hecl, java, programming, scripting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.