I'd say the difference in HyperCard and Visual Basic is that they also define their runtime environment. The IDE can grow with the runtime. Writing tooling against a vast runtime like the web is much more difficult and daunting.

A 1.0 would need to address a large enough surface area of the web to be useful. There's also a discordance between hand-coding "friendly" HTML/CSS and what would be exposed in a WYSIWYG tool. Further complications are all the new and old bugs in browsers.

That said, every day I was working on Hype 1.0 in early 2011, I would nervously check Hacker News for a "Show HN" post for a HTML5 animation app that would steal the thunder; luckily none came. This is even more surprising given Hype exports were mostly compatible with Internet Explorer 6 -- such an app could have been written long ago.

Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today. Requirements for the entry into profession is so much lower from any point of view: time, difficulty and cost.

Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty so common people prefer to just pay for someone else for their time rather than learn anything on their own.

Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or electrician even though most of people are capable of fixing many of their problems just by following simple tutorial and common sense. Programming is no different here: it's just easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.

> Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today.

I absolutely don't buy this.

My father, a high school English teacher, could barely run a spreadsheet that I set up for his grades--something that basically everyone can do today without blinking.

And even he could use Hypercard.

It's the tools, not the people.

I second this. Flash, HyperCard, Dreamweaver, VisualBasic 6 are all the tools I (along with my classmates) played with during high school before any official cs/engineering training.

Plus life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about i18n, encryption of any kind, HiDPI displays, Unicode of any sort, really any of dozens of things that modern users expect to just work.

Sometimes you had. Timezones, encryption for sensitive places, zillions of European standards (one PER language), and so on.

VB6 had Unicode throughout, and even some HiDPI stuff (e.g. all widgets were measured in "twips", a DPI-independent unit).

Because that kind of tooling doesn't go along with UNIX FOSS CLI culture, so only the ones comfortable in the graphical eco-systems of the like of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Qt masters and friends, get to enjoy them.

Likewise I rather spend my time in Unreal and Unity, than trying to feel superior while doing everything from scratch with SDL.

Developers decided that catering to text editor users was the only way forward, which killed most prospects of good authoring tools.