Greg on Nostr: HyperTalk was kind of fun, and the whole HyperCard environment was an easy way to ...

HyperTalk was kind of fun, and the whole HyperCard environment was an easy way to create a kind of Macintosh GUI app. I used it to simulate cockpit controls for a U.S. Navy aircraft that was in development at the time, so essentially I was mocking up the user interface for the aircraft. The group I worked for was called Pilot Vehicle Interface (PVI), but I left them to work on avionics software because I thought that was *real programming*. I learned a lot doing avionics, but it was a much more structured software engineering situation that was not as free-wheeling and fun as when I was with PVI.

The biggest problem with HyperTalk was that Apple tried to make it English-like so that non-programmer people could use it. That made the syntax somewhat verbose and sometimes ambiguous. Other programming languages that tried to be "easy", such as COBOL, BASIC, Excel, PHP, or even JavaScript, have similar problems to a lesser extent.