[nicpottier]

The thing I've always felt held back these paradigms is something that is inherent in them, they are too visual.

That sounds crazy, but just look at this article and how he described what he did. He had to take a million screenshots to show it. The same is true for say, the Android app builder, or the Lego logic thing.. the way you sure code is via a screenshot.

And that just doesn't scale very well I don't think. It makes copy/pasting, the most basic way that people learn, really difficult.

HTML5 is pretty awesome, or rather WOULD be pretty awesome if we could erase the last 15 years and all start with CSS3 compliant browsers. But it is such a mess now that I feel bad for anybody starting from scratch.

But the combination of HTML for layout and Javascript for layout is pretty darn powerful, and I think pretty accessible as well. You could certainly build something on the order of the simplicity of Hypercard on that stack.

But I do like the author's comments about the shame that there are far fewer 'programmers' than back in the old days. BASIC on the AppleII is of course the other example (among others).. where it was just so easy and almost natural for ANY user to start getting a feel for things and hacking around. Losing that really IS a shame.