[analog31]

Aside from Bill Atkinson simply being a genius, a shining trait of HC is that it didn't try to do everything.

There was a successor to HC called SuperCard (which I used to create a printed circuit board drawing app). SC added all of the features "missing" from HC, such as a large variety of different window types. In the process, it became harder to use, for not very much gain. Having both HC and SC on my computer, I invariably reached for HC, even when it meant that my programs didn't look quite as snappy.

For me, HC was what made it tolerable to use a Mac. I did some pretty outrageous things with it, such as controlling a primitive custom machine tool. I did have to create some "code resources" in Pascal or C to access my hardware interfaces, but those codes were often on the order of a couple dozen lines, and rarely needed to be maintained.

Visual Basic made the same mistake. The more "professional" it became, the harder it was for the people who were actually interested in using it. I stuck with VB5 long after VB.NET came out.

[badsectoracula]

This reminded me of the comments i've read online from modders about the modding tools for Neverwinter Nights 1 vs those of Neverwinter Nights 2. Both are very moddable games but the NWN1 tools were actually designed as part of the product (for many the official campaign was just a demo for the tools) and were very simple to use - but also very limited (e.g. areas could only be made by placing prefabricated tiles - though you could make your own tiles with external tools and also add additional objects on top of them, most of the area work was placing tiles together). On the other hand NWN2 was more freeform, had better visuals and features, allowed arbitrary terrain sculpting, etc but that also made it much more complicated to use.

As a result NWN1 has a ton more modules (campaigns/mods) for it than NWN2 and many people who spent considerable time on NWN1 never moved to NWN2 due to the increased complexity. To this day i often find comments about how simple and easy the NWN1 tools were, but i don't remember ever reading anything like that for NWN2 :-P.

[gcanyon]

That's an interesting point about not doing everything. Livecode is a more powerful, capable tool very much based on HC, and while it has a great power-to-complexity ratio, I don't think it's (made up numbers) 5x more powerful, but 8x more complex. https://livecode.com/