HyperCard was probably one of the most influential pieces of software ever written. It still has one direct clone ("Livecode") being sold commercially, and I believe Director (whose programming language started as an inferior clone of HyperTalk) is still being sold by Adobe.
It was also an incredibly stable programming environment. Back in an era when computers in general were as flaky as hell, you could work on it all day and experience nary a crash (and since it saved everything by default you tended not to lose anything even when it did crash).
Remember that HyperCard was introduced in 1987 or so, the GUI/WIMP era was just getting started. The learning curve of writing a Macintosh application was incredibly steep - nearly impossible IMO - but here was a way to make a simple point-and-click app that actually did something (write to a file, do some calculations, show information, even talk out the serial port, etc) with a minimal amount of lifting. My first paid piece of software was a point-of-sale application written in HyperCard. And it worked just fine.
VB was pretty much the equivalent for Windows, once it came along.
The web is close in some respects (HTML is easy) and not in others (servers and single-page apps are not).
I suppose, in another respect, Excel is a successor for many, though it isn't a good solution for making apps of any sort.
Surprisingly, the closest I've seen has been Microsoft's Project Siena[1]. I've not used it extensively, but my 5 or 10 minute made it look like it had the dirt-simple-to-get-started appeal of HyperCard and VB.
Anyone know of other "spiritual successors" out there?
[1] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-projec...
I'm hoping Mozilla's AppMaker[3] comes to something, but I haven't been able to actually make it work yet.
I can't say that I find any of these really (yet) hitting the sweet spot that HyperCard did, but that may be my own ignorance. :-D
Also, why “way too early”? Too early for what?
The most important feature of HyperCard, in my opinion, was that it gave end-users powerful general-purpose tools for programming and solving their own problems, in a way that was easy to get started with. Instead of being locked into someone’s existing program designed with an idealized customer’s needs, any HyperCard user could create or customize a HyperCard stack to suit their own preferences.
Unfortunately, tools requiring customer learning and mastery are very difficult to design and implement, and even more difficult to demo and sell. And so our software is designed in a very narrow and limiting fashion. The “cards” in android and facebook and twitter &c. are doing nothing to combat this, and to compare them favorably to HyperCard is in my opinion to completely (and tragically) miss the point of HyperCard.
I don’t see any particular signs of this trend toward closed systems reversing; indeed, as more people come online, and giant corporations spend billions of dollars hiring all the smartest people to work on developing software that gives them (the corporations) as much control as possible over uses of computer hardware/software, the popular machines and software systems are only getting more closed and locked down. The web itself is an open and flexible platform, but increasingly people are spending their time in a few centralized and controlled parts of it.