Continuing the discussion from Bill Atkinson Diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer:
You might be surprised… LiveCode is still around and is an evolution of MetaCard which was a HyperCard clone. So spiritually, it could be considered an evolution of HyperCard. There’s an open source version too.
I was a rather active HyperCard user and developer for years, including writing XCMDs and XFCNs.
But looking at LiveCode, I wonder who (and why) would use such a tool instead of something else that targets the web. I don’t mean to put LiveCode down (I’ve never used it), but for the purposes I’d have used HyperCard, the web would seem to be a better platform because of its lower delivery overhead. Maybe there’s more to LiveCode than some quick research leads me to believe.
For HyperCard inspirations, don’t forget Supercard that appears to be discontinued. And most especially don’t forget Roger Wagner’s “HyperStudio” that’s still being sold. There was an Apple IIGS version, and this Macintosh version is still sold. Roger is another kind genius.
I’ve not used LiveCode in years, and when I did it was cursory, so I’m by no means an expert. But my impression is that it’s no longer trying to be a HyperCard clone. That was where it started, but I think they’ve used the concepts of how you built a stack and evolved them into a rapid app-development environment. One of the available targets for LiveCode apps is the web (as well as Mac, iOS, Android, etc). So it seems a not-unreasonable evolution from a philosophical standpoint especially given that, back in HyperCard’s days, stacks were used to create what we’d now call native Mac apps.