Why HyperCard Failed (2002)

I've had thirty years to reflect on HyperCard and my relationship with it. I've come to the conclusion, and it looks like Gruber did as well, that what HC users really wanted for Mac was their own version of Visual Basic.

The early Mac frameworks were painful. No way around it. People wanted to make interesting things, or even small useful things, with this environment and couldn't. HyperCard allowed people to get a lot closer to their goal than MPW.