[dahjelle]

I definitely agree that software desire requires analytical thinking. (It certainly put a halt in my thoughts about a mass-appeal software builder: if they don't "get" [or want to get, or whatever] Excel, they don't have a chance for much else.)

I do think, though, that not being able to make projects of large-ish size isn't necessarily important for a wide variety of use cases. Most of the best apps I know of do only a very small thing—but do it very well. I think HyperCard allow people to do small things exactly the way they wanted. Which maybe wasn't very well, but was good enough for their needs and better than the alternatives.

As I mentioned in my other comment [1], I wonder if the parallel is somewhat like the UNIX command line. You probably aren't going to write a MySQL competitor in bash. But there are a whole class of small custom tools that you will write.

To perhaps restate my original point (and this is where perhaps we agree), the abstractions of HyperCard eventually didn't (couldn't?) adapt. Perhaps, as you said, because of cards. As someone else commented, also partially because of the codebase, but also, I think, because things like color and networking and a greater number of standard UI widgets all had to be added.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3294915