Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day.  I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff.<p>I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, you could figure out how to make buttons and event mappings, and I thought it was so cool that you could easily <i>animate</i> things in the form of movie clips without having to finagle with cycling through sprites. I made simple point and click adventures, interactive menus, and once I took physics and calculus in high school, a very simple platformer. It was a lot of fun.<p>Nowadays the closest thing I've found for a similar level of easiness is GameMaker Studio, and I have a copy (legitimate this time :) ), and it's fun to play with, but it still feels more complicated than it needs to be.  With Flash, I never had to learn about shader programming or anything like that.  To be clear, I'm not trying to <i>knock</i> GameMaker for this, it's a great tool, it's just not as simple as Flash, for better or worse.<p>Obviously Flash Player needed to die, and I'm not suggesting we resurrect it. It was a horrible buggy mess a lot of the time (especially on non-Windows platforms in my experience), but I don't feel like we've really "replaced" it fully yet, at least not on the development side.<p>Hypercard was a bit before my time, sadly (we didn't have a working Mac in the 90s), but it looks like something I would have really enjoyed playing with.