There were many reasons why Hypercard died: Hypercard was very much a product of it's time. Software was far less complex so it was much easier to create a ge

There were many reasons why Hypercard died: Hypercard was very much a product of it's time. Software was far less complex so it was much easier to create a general purpose development tool for end users. The author argues that attempts to recreate Hypercard try to do too much, that is because users expect more of software today. To give you an idea of what I mean: I used Hypercard to create a cookbook for a family member in the mid-1990's. You could enter recipes, search for recipes, and even export them to HTML. While this would have been an amazing accomplishment a few years earlier, the program was a relic of a bygone era the moment that it was written. Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, may have been possible but would have required extensions to the language. Plenty of extensions existed, which is how companies like Cyan managed to produce an amazing for the time multimedia game (Myst) on what most people viewed as a stack of programmable black and white index cards. Yet extending Hypercard to reflect the technology of the 1990's would have transformed a product for everyone to an incomprehensible mass for anyone aside from developers. And the 1990's were primitive compared to the 2010's, never mind the coming 2020's. In a similar vein, people's interests changed. The mid-1990's brought the web, so people were far more interested in developing for the web. The early days of web development were quite accessible, was focused upon content (much as Hypercard was) and allowed people to embed programs within that content (much as Hypercard did). While Hypercard may have been better for some things and certainly provided a better development environment, it was also obsolete. As much as I loved Hypercard, the reality is that it was neglected rather than buried. It's longevity could have been improved without increasing complexity, such as adding colour or allowing multimedia files to be embedded (without resorting to third-party extensions). On the other hand, it would have died off eventually. The trajectory of web development shows how a once simple and accessible platform can become so complex that it takes a dedicated student to learn.