However, all of the old warts still remain, probably because otherwise you couldn't upgrade from Flash 4 and compile to newer SWF versions. Macromedia beat Actions into something that could vaguely-resemble an ECMA-262 3ed language runtime if you squinted hard enough. './hero:gun/bullet' would go up one clip, look for something called hero, look for a gun on the hero, and then a bullet in the gun. If you wanted to store a property on an object you had to use slash paths. In fact, pre-AS1, Flash Actions were a dramatically different VM. Stringing together IBActions or attaching event handlers to DOM elements may be a more general solution, but most of the time the distance it introduces between the button and its effect is just extra cognitive overhead. In HyperCard or REALbasic, the code for what a button does is 'inside' the button, so if you want to know how it works or modify its behavior, you just 'open it up' it in the editor. One of the things modern tools left behind is how the code and UI were bound together.

As an elementary school student I could churn out HyperCard stacks without being able to search Google, ask on StackOverflow, or watch a YouTube tutorial. When I try to write a GUI app these days, I'm stunned by how much harder it seems. When I started college I switched to writing C++, which I perceived as a more 'professional' language, but in doing so left the GUI behind and started producing almost exclusively command-line tools. I started out with HyperCard and when I outgrew it, upgraded to REALbasic, a cross-platform Visual Basic clone (now Xojo).

Old mac os program hypercard