Why Hypercard Had to Die
This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard.<p>Hypercard was the BASIC of the Macintosh in that it served the same niche.  It certainly was not BASIC, but the idea was the same, a little language and environment that fit into the machine's environment that allowed novices (and then highly practiced novices :-)) to create stuff on the machine for other people to use.<p>It was killed for the same reason BASIC, in the sense of built-in 8bit micro BASIC, kind of fell to the wayside except as a way to stitch existing apps together.  No one is really impressed by a calculator program anymore.  Matching the capabilities of modern software is hard nowadays.  It's demotivating to create a calculator program... that's it?  Hypercard really can't match even JS, et al. in functionality.<p>I remember when it started to happen in the 16bit era.  Software was already starting to get too good and too complex for a simple tool.  I got an Amiga.  The Amiga had a built-in BASIC -- but no one used it.  Why?  Because there was no fucking way you were going to recreate even the bouncing ball demo in BASIC.  It wasn't going to happen.  Essentially, anything you created was going to be a huge disappointment with that tool.  This was not necessarily true in the 8bit days -- but from 16bit on, you either learned assembly/C or gave up.  People can learn in that environment (and did), but the barrier was much higher.<p>Lowering that barrier while coming close to the capability of "real" software is a hard problem.  Fortunately, it's coming full circle.  Now that machines are powerful enough that "real" software is being written in interpreters, JS seems like it actually <i>is</i> the new BASIC.<p>I'm not totally sold on that -- because the stack is too too baroque (although, again, people do learn in that environment).  Processing is perilously close but not quite there because it's so domain specific.  Python comes with a lot, but doesn't fit into native environments very well.  If I had to chose, I'd say it's going to be something else over the JS/CSS/HTML stack in the same way 8bit BASIC sat over the primitive OS at the time.