There still is no free development tool out there that matches what Hypercard did in terms of power and ease of use. We're still coding with languages designed for constraints that disappeared decades ago.
If nothing matches Hypercard, why don't people use it (or some opensource copy) of it? So many seem enthralled by it but the reality is no one seems to want to bring it back.
I haven't explored all the copies, but the ones I have seen tend to be less featureful and/or less user-friendly than the original.
Furthermore, probably the best modern software that's similar to Hypercard in its overall flexibility and power is...the web. Back in the day, Hypercard was it; there wasn't really anything else in that space. Nowadays, there's still nothing that's quite as awesome or matches all its features, but there are things that are much closer and do a lot of the same things that are much more accessible than emulating or reimplementing Hypercard.
I haven't tried SheepShaver much, I admit, because most of the stuff I want to run was written for 68k and runs poorly or not at all on PPC.
From Dutch you can switch to English using the menu in the top right corner (click "Engels")
Notably, would run without any need for servers (or, worse, the subscription-and-lock-in "services" ubiquitous today -- arguably the 1980s "computer revolution" was strangled in the cradle, and we've gone most of the way back to 1970s-style time-sharing now: how many phone apps etc. will run usefully without a net connection? The "smartphone" is essentially a small "glass TTY", rather than personal computer in the '80s sense.)
I've run HC stacks written 30+ years ago. How many current-day "web app" documents will be readable as-found 30 years from now? For that matter, I've paid for iOS apps that would no longer execute after half a year (on account of Apple's "API changes", or in some cases -- author's "call home" server fell down and did not get up, etc.) Permanence (in the most basic "I paid for this and it ought to be usable for so long as any compatible iron remains functional" sense) is no longer part of the software commercial culture, and one is likely to be laughed at for merely raising the question.
We now have a generation or two that completely missed this era, and, worse, might be uninterested in the history. The idea that you would have a ubiquitous, portable, always-on personal computing device and that -- at least from the perspective of people who are knowledgeable of about this history -- you would put a Unix on it is completely crazy.
It is, as you say, an expensive and sleek teletype emulator
Well, HyperCard had several lives.
An early version of HyperCard 3.0 was demonstrated at WWDC in 1996 which used QuickTime ("QuickTime Interactive", or QTi) as its runtime. That would've allowed stacks to run in browsers, and in every app that leveraged QuickTime to render multimedia content.
The 1992 killing was before my time, but in any case HyperCard was effectively killed forever in 2000 when Jobs reassigned the HyperCard engineering team to not-HyperCard.
It also led to a great number of “regular folks” making “forms” and adding code. And VBX allowed people in Excel to do stuff.
Also don’t forget AppleScript. And now on iOS we have Shortcuts and Workflow too.
PS: Disclaimer, I work for them.
Examples of this include elisp and emacs, smalltalk and squeak, and to a lesser extent visual studio and C#.
There have been relatively few ecosystems so integrated. Java and Javascript/html/electron apps are notably not like that at all. There is no one "the" environment for coding those, simply several very popular ones.
My own take is that Apple should have made a "Hypercard"-like thing the "top layer" of a new operating system. In other words, the entire desktop/windows/buttons interface to the main OS would be itself scripted in Hypercard.
Smalltalk takes this a step further of course by making the whole operating system a live environment. The very UI vocabulary one uses can also double as "programming"
This is a fundamentally different way of how the environment works. You could stop a program and access the development environment because that was part of the runtime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
Netscape was going to have a built in editor, but they ran out of time, was added in Netscape 3 Gold, and there by default in 4.
(Pre-Edgmium, Edge's Dev Tools even shared a bunch of code with VS Code and briefly explored hosting a full VS Code experience.)
::ye olde Mozilla Composer appears directly::
No you wouldn't, but you can ;) How high is your tolerance today?
I say tolerance because much more recently I had problems trying to make a chart and tripping over colspan and rowspan stuff. I really just need to sketch the contents out on paper, first...
I doubt Hypercard would have ever gotten anything like CSS. It was unlikely enough that CSS ended up anything like CSS!