I wrote a new blog post outlining a number of useful design patterns and ways of working that fall out of the “stack-of-cards” metaphor shared by Decker and HyperCard:

http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

For me, I think the most appropriate metaphor is that it is the “workbench.” Or, the supercharged REPL: a computational notebook or a literate programming environment.

I’ve always gravitated towards things where I can work incrementally: Lisp, Lua, Jupyter notebooks, R-Studio markdown, etc. I’ve even gone so as far as making an environments where I can incrementally program and test C code, to emulate a notebook-like interface.

The other thing that I like, and you even mention this in the workbook section: it gives me the capability to build it as I need. That’s the Forth and Lisp creed. Or roughly, Unix creed. Do one thing and do it well - which I’ve always interpreted as, build only the thing you need.

It’s the peeve I have with other computer scientists or software engineers. They try to solve everyone’s problem, but end up either solving no one’s or doing it really badly.

So - yeah - Decker scratches the itch just right for me.

As somebody coming from a Python background, it’s taking me a while to adjust to making the most use of Decker’s strengths. So far, I’ve found the “Cards are Workbenches” to be the most empowering thing - where in Python I might write a suite of unit-tests, in Decker I can drop down some sliders and a canvas, wire them up, and see the thing I’m working on updating at 60fps. And once I’ve gotten the thing to work the way I want, other cards can just read the values of those sliders.

I discovered a bunch of things from that post, including:

• making a button transparent, and then drawing a custom icon behind it
• there’s a navigation history so that go["Back"] always does the right thing
• the correspondence between foo.key and foo["key"] is not just for dicts (as in JavaScript) but you can also do card.event.reset instead of card.event["reset"] to invoke an event handler
• I had thought about “cards as objects”, but didn’t realise it could be so ergonomic to use them that way; the link between cards and contraptions seems even stronger

Thanks for writing it!

I love that intro. People who want to lock their decks weird me out. In my book, exported decks remaining fully editable is the best thing about Decker. (Got a story about that, in fact.) And using transitions to suggest spatial relationships between cards was the first trick I learned. There's much to think about!