[analog31]

As I understand the history, a couple of things happened. First, HC got kicked around from one business entity to another, and was never wholeheartedly supported by Apple. It was kind of an orphan. There are legends that Bill Atkinson had to go ballistic in order to get it included with the Mac at all.

Second, HC reached its zenith (the final version was a real improvement over its predecessors) just as Apple went into somewhat of a dark age in between System 7 and OS X.

I loved my Mac but never felt that Apple was interested in encouraging indie or small-scale software development. I can't say that Windows was any better, but Windows had a built in lightweight API called MS-DOS.

Continuing my revisionist history, I think what happened next is simply that desirable computer system features proliferated more rapidly than any development tool could keep up with. And the diversity of interests in programming is what would stymie such a revival today.