I loved System 7 for its simplicity yet all of the potential it had for individual developers.
Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.
Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.
Even modern desktop Linux pales in comparison because although it’s technically possible to change anything imaginable about it, to do a lot of things that extensions did you’re looking at at minimum writing your own DE/compositor/etc and at worst needing to tweak a whole stack of layers or wade through kernel code. Not really general user accessible.
Because extensions were capable of changing anything imaginable and often did so with tiny-niche tweaks and all targeted the same system, any moderately technically capable person could stack extensions (or conversely, disable system-provided ones which implemented a lot of stock functionality) and have a hyper-personalized system without ever writing a line of code or opening a terminal. It was beautiful, even if it was unstable.
You could also directly jump into the ExitToShell code in ROM (G 49F6D8, IIRC). Later versions of Minibug had an “es” command that more or less did the same thing (that direct jump always jumps into the ROM code, “es” would, I think, jump to any patched versions)
Writing a MacOS classic extension wasn’t exactly easy. Debugging one could be a nightmare.
I’m not sure how GTK themes are done now, but they used to be very easy to make.
And it wasn’t just theming. Classic Mac OS extensions could do anything from add support for new hardware to overhaul the text rendering system entirely to giving dragged desktop icons gravity and inertia to adding a taskbar or a dock. The sky was the limit, and having a single common target to do any of those things (vs. being split between the kernel and a thousand layers/daemons/DEs/etc) meant that if it could be done, it probably had been.
I’ve done a couple MITM toys with Windows 3.x and the trick is always exposing the same interface as the thing you want to replace, even if you only do something like inverting mouse movements on odd minutes, you just pass everything else down to the original module.
A point for discussion is whether image-based systems are the same kind of thing as OSes where system and applications are separate things, but if we include them, Smalltalk-80 is better in that regard. It doesn’t require you to reboot to install a new version of your patch (if you’re very careful, that’s sometimes possible in classic Mac OS, too, but it definitely is harder) and is/has an IDE that fully supports it.
Lisp systems and Self also have better support for it, I think.
of course modern smalltalks or st-inspired systems could still incorporate these ideas
2001 "Mastering ENVY/Developer".
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...
You had on the one hand had a technology that desperately needed adoption to build a culture and best-practices documentation, and on the other hand you had short term profit motive seriously getting in the way, so what you had that was completely cutting edge for decades, eventually it wasn't anymore - or the world moved in another direction and your once revolutionary technology became an ill fit for it.
By the 2000s with monotone and darcs, but specially with the rise of git, other standards for versioning have superseded what could have been. Smalltalkers already by the 2010s should have been wise to try to incorporate what is clearly a standard now but instead a bunch of invented-here systems for versioning and repositories and hybrids have developed in its place. And by incorporate i don't mean "let's make X for ST" but making it core in their implementation so that the system itself is more easily understood and used, even if its to take pieces of it away and use them which is actually a strength and not a weakness! contrary to some brand of 90s-era beliefs.
Generally speaking, to this very day it's regarded as cool and as a feature in ST world that something is ST-only, conveniently "integrated" into the system as tightly as possible and, implicitly but insidiously and glaringly, near-impossible to use elsewhere except maybe as a concept and laundered of its origin.