I think that the problem the OP has with most current app-in-a-can tools is that they don't allow users to create arbitrary simple things, but only fairly specific types of simple things.
Compilers, IDEs, etc. are themselves generalized tools to produce more specialized tools; as a result of being generalized, they require special knowledge to use. A programming environment that allowed you to create an arbitrary specialized application using only general knowledge of computing would certainly be a great thing to have -- in fact, I'd describe it as the holy grail of computing.
People have been pursuing that goal for decades. Partial solutions have been discovered in the past (the OP mentions Hypercard, Visual Basic, etc.) but have generally been insufficiently powerful. It is also frequently difficult to keep them up to date with changes in the underlying technology.
For "classic" (content-based) web apps (forums, CMSes, blogs), there's already fairly sophisticated, end user-targeted tools that fill that role. For a lot of people, WordPress is the Visual Basic of the web. Some wiki engines could be said to resemble Hypercard.
But the community is so split on what the "modern web app" should look like (thin client? thick client? standards-based or not? use the DOM or draw directly?) that I think it'd be much harder to gain much support for a "Hypercard for the Web" -- many web developers, possibly even a majority, would consider it to be "doing it wrong" and "teaching bad habits" _no matter what it looked like_.
While we're at it, let's also have a replicator to make any kind of food we want, instantly and deliciously, without any culinary training whatsoever, beyond being able to press the "pasta carbonara" setting (oh but I don't want there to be eggs in the carbonara, and can it have tuna instead of ham, and can it use a different kind of noodle, but I still want it to taste like carbonara and be delicious...)
Is it? We had simple yet general-purpose tools for end-users at various points (eg. Hypercard). Why can't we have them again?
If your response is, "Sure, but they can't do anything complex/building interactive experiences is still hard" well, we had Flash, etc, but also, at some point this is moving the goalposts so far as to constitute meaninglessness. If what you're asking is, "why isn't there a simple-to-use WYSIWYG editor that I can use to build anything I want," then my answer is, "it's riding on the back of my unicorn."
>>In other words, we need to make it possible for people to build simple things without much coding. Oh wait, people already can build simple things, but....that's not what you mean?
Before that, he claimed that all of the big companies that had made packaged tools, like VB, had gone extinct. That might be a slight exaggeration.
In other words, we need to make it possible for people to build simple things without much coding. Oh wait, people already can build simple things, but....that's not what you mean?
The Web is actually a phenomenally easy platform to learn how to write code for, compared to basically every platform I've ever seen that came before it. Yeah, it has a shitload of quirks and stupidities and kludges, but that's what happens when you're building a system that gets used by a very large percentage of the global human population.
The author writes as though he's never actually considered that doing anything at scale - not programming, anything; running a train system, or setting up a government, or selling falafels to people at lunchtime - inevitably involves hacks, compromises, kludges and half-measures. "Technical debt" is just another term for "doing things that involve humans".