LiveCode is a modern day HyperCard (2019)

Well, now you just need to get a "livecode player" shipped in something widely distributed by default. :-D

The ability to cross compile is VERY cool, and I don't mean to belittle it or suggest that passing stack files around is better. As someone who builds software for distribution, the cross compilation is much better, and getting it done with compatibility that wide is technically really impressive.

But putting myself back in the headspace that had me using HyperCard, sharing my stuff without any build step at all was a big deal.

I like your loader stack technique. It sounds like just the sort of thing we'd have tried in HC if network access had been a common, reliable thing.

To be completely honest I haven't been involved in the Windows ecosystem in probably 15 years so I am not really sure. I switched over to using Macs in 2005 or so. I just Googled it and poked around and, yeah, at a high level it looks a lot like the old VB form builder.

The thing is, the form builder was just part of what made the VB experience so great. It was how everything tied together conceptually into a complete environment that, crucially, was very easy to understand and very approachable. The form builder was easy to grasp, language was very simple and straightforward, and the documentation was just astounding (to this day I have yet to find anyone who has as good documentation as Microsoft did in the 90s.) You could crank out a simple app in a matter of hours with it.

In the late 90s I got swept up in the dot-com boom and started doing web development. That's been my primary bread and butter since, although these days I have moved into a more management-focused role so most of the development I do is on my own time to keep my skills sharp. I have occasionally written things in Java (using Netbeans, whose form builder was very similar to VB) and Objective-C (again, Interface Builder reminded me a lot of VB).

I've been doing a lot of Swift recently for macOS development because it's such a fun language, but I haven't jumped over to using SwiftUI. It's just not ready for prime time yet, IMHO, especially for macOS apps. And I really just prefer building GUIs using a GUI builder like Storyboards or even old fashioned NIBs/XIBs, since most of the macOS apps I write I am the sole developer on, the version control issues with GUI definition files aren't a big issue for me.

Though I will say that I think SwiftUI has potential - especially with the live preview as you're building. It just doesn't work very well right now for complex macOS apps.

This may sound crazy, but my 7 year old daughter and I had the most fun with TIC-80 (https://tic80.com) and Lua. She is very comfortable with the notion of writing a program that's later run, as well as the concept of variables. The only thing I wish TIC-80 had is an easy way to prompt user to input a string. This feature would be a game-changer for TIC-80 as a programming education platform.

There's no pleasing some people.

Never mind that Livecode IDE runs on Linux, Mac and Windows it also can produce compiled apps that run on those 3 platforms and iOS and Androd and even as a webapp like PHP. And it can even compile to HTML5 (although that's more limited).

It works with version control and unicode, it has regex, cryptography, sockets, JSON, XML, OAuth2, SVG etc. It has database libraries for interacting with sqlite, postgresql, mysql, etc. It can incorporate a web browser and control that using Javascript and callbacks. It can be extended to integrate with Java, Objective-C, etc. You can create your own GUI widgets. And it's free.

But that's still too much like Hypercard, which only ran on an ancient Mac and nothing else. Hypercard could do about 10% of what Livecode can do. And Hypercard has been dead since before you touched an IDE.