The Best Programming Language Ever?

I was having a conversation at work today about what people’s tastes in programming languages were and there was some discussion about human readability, which led me to mention HyperTalk. HyperTalk was the programming language used by HyperCard, it had the virtue of being incredibly readable and (unlike the similarly readable AppleScript) also very easy to write. I mentioned that “whenever you see — used to denote a comment, there lies the ghost of HyperTalk” to which someone replied, “like in HTML?”.

An HTML comment is denoted by “<!–” and “–>” (note that WordPress is screwing this up, I really do know what HTML comments look like) which seems like a non-coincidence. Tim Berners Lee invented HTTP and HTML using NeXT computers, which didn’t run HyperCard, but which were spiritually related to the Mac, and it’s hard to imagine that HyperCard wasn’t a major influence on the design of the web.

HyperCard has the distinction of being one of the most influential programs ever written, perhaps the most. (Bill Atkinson wrote HyperCard and MacPaint, two of the most influential programs ever written. Photoshop is, essentially, MacPaint running on modern hardware.) Paul Allen spent a fortune cloning it (Toolbook) and it was clearly a huge influence on Visual Basic. Director’s Lingo started out as a straight clone of HyperTalk. Even 3D Studio Max’s MaxScript bears its mark. If we assume that the web was directly inspired by HyperCard — a not unreasonable assumption — that makes it perhaps the most influential  program ever written.

HyperCard was amazingly nice to code in. HyperCard 2 had a modern debugger, there was a third party compiler (written in HyperTalk that could compile to assembler), and it virtually never crashed. By default, all state was preserved (in fact, if you wanted to write a conventional application you had to jump through hoops to create “empty” documents). The main failing of HyperTalk was its lack of support for OO and functional programming (it was internally an object-oriented message-passing architecture, but you couldn’t build your own objects). It would be pretty simple to bolt that kind of functionality onto it, but no-one has, and HyperTalk has largely passed into obscurity.

Surprisingly, there are three modern HyperCard clones still being maintained. Toolbook has focused on authoring CBT, while Runtime Revolution tries to be all things to all people, and SuperCard is Mac only. Unfortunately, all seem pretty clunky by today’s standards. (And, frankly, for all its virtues, HyperCard was a bit clunky even when it was new. It never allowed you to build proper user interfaces.)

It would be interesting to see HyperTalk updated to support modern language features OR something like HyperCard built on top of a modern language like Python or Ruby. The obvious thing to do would be to build a web-based IDE on top of Django or Rails.