As soon as your eyes adjust to the density, I think this is actually quite legible. There are sensible names, and the formatting and arrangement serve to show the regularity of operations.
Was completely unaware of Decker before reading this, and wanted to say that it is unlike anything I had seen before. But then it reminded me of things like the Arduboy or PICO-8 in being a kind of alt-history tech by spawning an ecosystem around an old mac-style UI, instead of a handheld console UI like the former two.
I'm curious what OPs motivation for using it is. Is it a sort of "limitation bebreeds creativity" thing or something else?
Is there a name for this for of projects more broadly?
To be honest, never been a Mac user and HyperCard may have been a bit before my time. The Windows 95-98 er UX brings me more nostalgia.
But I can definitely relate to the yearning for older, clunkier, "quieter" tech, in this age of ubiquitous HTML, CSS, JS. These maybe seemingly naive assumptions like mixing code and presentation, suboptimal UX, and the fact that people still enjoy developing for them for fun rather than for some SaaS end, feels, I don't know, cozy?
HyperCard must be one of the most influential pieces of software ever written regardless of one's age or OS of choice. Ivan Zhao always seems to find an excuse to credit Bill Atkinson's creation for influencing what he wanted to achieve with Notion.
I love it, thanks for creating this.
And what I especially like: if you save it as html file, it contains the engine itself and makes no calls to the outside world.
Decker is one of the craziest code bases I'm aware of: a single, incredibly dense file:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JohnEarnest/Decker/refs/he...
(I wonder how many tokens it'd be to make this legible...)
I think there are far worse codebases!
I guess LLMs would do a reasonable job making this legible, as long as there can be some tests to validate functionality alongside the migration.
Was completely unaware of Decker before reading this, and wanted to say that it is unlike anything I had seen before. But then it reminded me of things like the Arduboy or PICO-8 in being a kind of alt-history tech by spawning an ecosystem around an old mac-style UI, instead of a handheld console UI like the former two.
I'm curious what OPs motivation for using it is. Is it a sort of "limitation bebreeds creativity" thing or something else?
Is there a name for this for of projects more broadly?
But I can definitely relate to the yearning for older, clunkier, "quieter" tech, in this age of ubiquitous HTML, CSS, JS. These maybe seemingly naive assumptions like mixing code and presentation, suboptimal UX, and the fact that people still enjoy developing for them for fun rather than for some SaaS end, feels, I don't know, cozy?
Do yourself a favor and play with the original via a simulator https://infinitemac.org/1996/System%207.5.3.
https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Decker#Screenshot...