bill atkinson's 25th anniversary of hypercard talk at the berkeley macintosh user's group does such a wonderful job of communicating how important it was to allow people to express themselves through software authoring, instead of leaving software development to programmers
"Some of the stacks I was most interested in were stacks that were really kind of ugly, but they did exactly what this person needed. There was no way in hell a programmer would have ever been interested. There was no market to write that for.
But this guy had something to do with his astronomy gear - something that helped him point his telescope. He knew what he needed; he wasn't a programmer, but he could make it.
Some of the stacks did not have a lot of aesthetic polish. I used to say: some of these stacks, only a mother could love, but those mothers loved them."