Hello, human

How are you feeling right now?

A script was either invoked by an event “On” or by a “message”. The scripts in each layer were shown as a vertical panel in one view. This made “simple things simple, and complex things possible”.

HyperCard had dynamic context layers to which the scripts were attached. The top layer was scripts for buttons and fields, then for the card, the background (like a master in DTP), the stack of cards, the Home stack. And finally were scripts associated with HyperCard itself.

HyperTalk was not a great form for a programming language, and it wasn’t really English either. But a HyperTalk script looked like something you could understand and use, and modify when needed. This “gistibility” was the deep key in end-user-land.

the scripting was carefully modeled from the semantics and pragmatics of end-user interactions with the media. Many HyperTalk scripts were just a pseudo-English rendering of the user actions to accomplish the same goal. (There’s a real sense where this is teaching the end-user some weak non-scalable ideas about programming — but Bill and Dan Winkler (rightly) only cared about getting the end-users to really write real programs, and this worked so well in HyperTalk.)