[edtechdev]

I was sad to see Hypercard abandoned - I learned how to program with it myself (along with Perl & CGI apps - syntax didn't matter so much as what you could accomplish with it). But part of the reason I think is that Steve Jobs abandoned going primarily after the education market when he returned to Apple - he had already been burned by it (or become disillusioned by it) at Next, but also really Apple had already saturated the education market. He and Apple focused on the consumer market (imacs, ipods, etc.) - the business market had already been won by Microsoft. Microsoft also already had a more successful end-user friendly programming/scripting environment: Visual Basic and VBA. In case some don't know, Visual Basic was the most popular programming language in the world until overtaken by Java. VB didn't really start to significantly decline until more people developing business apps switched to C# and other languages.

Microsoft also won with a more popular tool for creating visual 'stacks' or presentations: Powerpoint. Most educators were basically using hypercard/supercard/hyperstudio to create presentations - and Powerpoint made it easier to do so.

Hypercard (and hypertalk) isn't dead though. Applescript is still around (despite Apple also trying to kill it). LiveCode and other options are still around and being updated for HTML5 & mobile platforms, as is Visual Basic, too (nsbasic). A java port of the hypertalk language is here: http://code.google.com/p/openxion/

Natural language-like interfaces aren't dead, either. Look at testing tools like Cucumber, the google search engine, Siri, and so forth. Look at all the DSLs out there that try to make Ruby/Javascript/etc. more like natural languages, at least in certain contexts.