Hypertalk has gone on from strength to strength. I'm surprised that the Ars Technica writer should be so uninformed.
Runtime Revolution have been providing a Hypercard environment for at least a decade, and the technology they acquired had been in use since about 1992 (it was originally designed for Unix environemnts).
Runrev's Livecode produces hypercard-like applications that run on Windows, OS X, linux, android, and iOS. It also runs server-side, but I have no use for that part of the tecnology.
I used RR a looooong time ago to write a configuration wizard for a Java development tool set. The product used text files for configuration, and over the years the files had swollen in incomprehensible ways as programmers stuck new options into them willy-nilly.
Project management decreed that a wizard would ship with the next release. I was a full time development manager, but and as all the programmers were busy building features, I could get away with grabbing this task for myself. I used RR and built it in a week-end. A week of polishing and catering to PM requests followed, and we were ready to ship on Windows and several flavours of Unix.
Then somebody blabbed that it was written in HyperCard rather than Java. Faeces was Flung Furiously at Fans. In the end, it was rewritten for the next version over the course of a month or two. But it was Java! I engaged in a little revisionist history: Instead of saying that my work was thrown away, I took credit for building the successful prototype.
Runtime Revolution have been providing a Hypercard environment for at least a decade, and the technology they acquired had been in use since about 1992 (it was originally designed for Unix environemnts).
Runrev's Livecode produces hypercard-like applications that run on Windows, OS X, linux, android, and iOS. It also runs server-side, but I have no use for that part of the tecnology.
http://www.runrev.com/
And no, I don't work for them. I've just been using the technology for the past 10 years or so.