Where's My Hypercard?
A fellow developer sent me a link to an article pointing out the features and price of a top-of-the-line PC from 1988:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2001/01/30.2.shtml
Looking at this PC from fifteen years ago is interesting, because I've been thinking about similar things with regards to today's PDA's and yesterday's desktops. The original CodeWarrior IDE ran on 68K machines with 8MB of RAM and less than 100MB of hard drive space. Except for the screen space, those specs are less than a current Palm OS device like the Sony SJ-22 with a 128MB memory stick. In theory, you could really do a whole development environment on a Palm OS device, and it probably would turn out pretty nice. There actually are some Palm OS hosted environments out there, like Pocket C, Hotpaw Basic, and Quartus Forth, but nothing really has an "IDE" feel to it. I suspect we don't do that because we all have desktop machines that are a lot powerful, and because Palm OS hasn't supported the kind of multitasking environment that you'd need to really debug a native application from another native app. The lack of necessity means we don't have neat hacks like "The Debugger", the insanely powerful 68K debugger for Mac OS that had its own operating system running external to Mac OS.
I've played with an idea in the back of my head for a while, and I'm wondering why I've not seen this. One of the first non-BASIC languages I worked with growing up was HyperTalk, part of the original HyperCard system on the porthole-style Macs. I really loved working with it, and I thought HyperCard was an awesome environment for doing a lot of simple development. I'm wondering why no Palm OS "Hypercard-equivalent" has shown up? Is it just a matter of screen size issues, or is there just no one interested in making the device more self-sufficient.
Update (5 Apr 2003)
Ron Nicholson has a list of on-device development environments at http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/palm/ . He counts 16 different options, and while nothing is quite like Hypercard, I was wrong in saying there are no Palm OS IDEs; OnBoard C is looking pretty good these days, with lots of enhancements since it was released as open source in 2002.
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Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
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