The language was clunky, yes, but it was very approachable; it was one of those languages that try to look like English, so non-programmers don't get scared off. Google for HyperTalk; you won't want to imitate too much of it, but you can get some ideas.
Will do, although part of my goal is that most end users won't work with the language at all.
Much of the design is built around the idea of Querki Explorer, an interactive wizard that lets you interact with your data step-by-step, and the idea is that, by a year from now, most non-programmers will usually use that. That outputs the underlying language, and the language (Querki Query Language, AKA QL, pronounced "cool") is designed specifically to map 1-to-1 to the wizard.
I have high hopes there. My experience from ProWiki is that you mostly care about data transformation for the sorts of problems I'm aiming at, so I've wound up with a pipeline-styled functional language that is pretty simple and elegant. We'll see how well it flies when it confronts a variety of real-world problems.
I suspect I don't care too much about kicking the tires of Hypercard. But you're correct that I should at least know what they did, and what people liked about it...
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Will do, although part of my goal is that most end users won't work with the language at all.
Much of the design is built around the idea of Querki Explorer, an interactive wizard that lets you interact with your data step-by-step, and the idea is that, by a year from now, most non-programmers will usually use that. That outputs the underlying language, and the language (Querki Query Language, AKA QL, pronounced "cool") is designed specifically to map 1-to-1 to the wizard.
I have high hopes there. My experience from ProWiki is that you mostly care about data transformation for the sorts of problems I'm aiming at, so I've wound up with a pipeline-styled functional language that is pretty simple and elegant. We'll see how well it flies when it confronts a variety of real-world problems.
I suspect I don't care too much about kicking the tires of Hypercard. But you're correct that I should at least know what they did, and what people liked about it...