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IMO the goal here isn't to replace traditional software engineering. It's to bring computing to spaces. Museums, classrooms, town halls, etc, which requires a different approach.

The mental model I use is professional cooking in a kitchen vs home cooking. Different scale, tools, and approaches but some overlap in core ideas.

A pro cook can criticize a home cook's workflow and tools, but the goals are different!

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I think their goal is similar to what smalltalk's goal originally was: To allow for regular people to do complex things with a computer.

Ultimately, it didn't succeed in that goal but I believe inventing the first spreadsheet software can be counted as achieving some success there.

I admire this project and hope they can one day move beyond simply typing code on a sheet of paper to creating tools that actually make our compilers/IDEs look like using punch cards.

Without Smalltalk, there would have been no HyperCard, and HyperCard definitely succeeded in that goal to a significant degree.

It's a pity there's never been a modern reboot with the right factors aligned to continue that work.

https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

I think Decker is just wonderful, but it's retro. That isn't a criticism of it at all, that's what it wants to be and I don't think it should try to be something else.

But it isn't what I meant. A HyperCard reboot would be a modern GUI builder with a deck-of-cards drag-drop metaphor, deployable as desktop, browser, and mobile apps for any platform. Mobile poses some problems, particularly iOS, but I don't think those are unsurmountable.

Decker is a love letter to the HyperCard which was. But if HyperCard had survived as a product, today's version wouldn't look anything like that.

Decker runs natively on a variety of platforms as well as on web browsers, and it fully supports touch devices like tablets. It isn't designed with small cellphones in mind, but I'm told that it's quite usable on phones that include a stylus. Just as touch support has improved over time, I have some ideas for providing a degree of fluid layout in the future without onerous impositions on deck authoring.

Decker is not a carbon-copy of HyperCard frozen in the past; it's a continuously evolving platform with many interesting innovations and experimental ideas. It has a distinct aesthetic, but I see this as a strength rather than a weakness: "modern" just means "in fashion", and fashions are always in flux.

It's great work what you've done, and as I said, I have no criticism of it at all.

But it's more than a distinct aesthetic, it is a distinctly retro aesthetic. Modern means contemporary, more than it means fashionable (sometimes retro aesthetics are in fashion, after all).

But terminological nuance is not very important here. The fact remains that, as wonderful as it is, Decker is not what I meant, and I don't think you're trying to make it into that either. For one thing you'd need a rather large marketing budget.

But to be sure, I wish you all success, whatever that might mean to you. If that includes transforming Decker into something which looks and feels like HyperCard might today, if Jobs hadn't put it out to pasture when he did, then more power to you.