A lovely tribute to Yahoo Pipes written by the inimitable Glenn Fleishman appeared on the Retool site today. > Every Pipes’ mapping was public; every Pipe could be copied and modified. “That was design principle one for us, and I think that had a lot to do with making it accessible to non-developers,” Sadri said. This openness that encouraged—really, required—knowledge-sharing embodied some of the internet’s best qualities that were on the verge of being lost at that time.

This raises I think a frankly pretty important question for me: why do things like this fail? This isn’t the only effort along these lines. There have been many. Apple ships two — Automator and Shortcuts. About my strongest belief about this industry is that we have failed badly at enabling non-programmers to do computing. Excel and FileMaker describe the two main limits, and they’re both about 30 years old. But when I try to invent ways of moving forward, a lot of them look like Pipes. Why hasn’t something like this succeeded?

Has Shortcuts failed? If so, what was its expectation of success that it didn't achieve?

HyperCard didn't fail, Pipes failed, Shortcuts hasn't yet failed – probably maps to their aspirations

Hypercard is no more. There are clones, but who uses them? By “fail” I mean “fail to become commonly used”, “fail to take over the world as it maybe should”.

It's a boring question and bad framing, whoever's equipped the mindset of "enabling non-programmers" has failed harder than most failures Start from "a great tool" - Pipes wasn't one - future great tools will be used by many types of people in many unexpected ways

If "commonly used" is the desired success criteria, then WidgetSmith (100m downloads — and made by a solo developer, at that) is probably the most successful bit of malleable software this side of excel.

Excel and FileMaker describe the two main limits, and they’re both about 30 years old

Is that a failure, or just a big early success?

Why not both?

I use a HyperCard clone like ‘er day 🫥 but I’m also here? 🤷‍♂️