I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly, quite the opposite.
OK, tools for the complete non-programmer maybe. Those are vaporware anyway. But tools for people with domain knowledge to do a little bit of programming were hugely successful. Visual Basic (pre .NET) is the best example. Click together a GUI, add a bit of Databinding, and write some business logic in BASIC. Spreadsheets are another, and they are a gateway drug to VBA. To a lesser extent the .NET ecosystem with XAML and so on falls into this category, too.
Another example was Flash. Artists could make little videos with the vector graphics tools (which are still pretty unique in how you can "paint" vector graphics). You could then animate them and make little movies, and add simple interactive features. Then you could add some ActionScript (~Javascript) to get more complex behavior and make litte games.
I'd say this kind of programming-language-light was hugely successful. Visual Basic, Access, and the likes, and the huge collection of commercial ActiveX controls was probably one of the most overlooked reasons for Microsoft's dominance in the late 90s. Millions of small businesses used MS products and small programs to generate reports, form letters, and so on. And the lasting legacy of Flash is probably the indy-gaming scene that is really successful nowadays (the other drive for that scene comes from mobile apps, which ironically was a main source of Flash's demise).
I don't know why this kind of programming tool slowly faded away. Maybe because people realized that it can cause huge maintenance headaches. Maybe because there is more supply of "proper" developers now. But I guess if someone built a decent IDE and allowed you to click together apps in a high-level fashion (and without boilerplate code!) and using Javascript or Python, it could be a success even today.
I don't think of either VB or Flash as being in any way 'non-programmer'. VB has tools to eliminate a lot of the more mechanical aspects of GUI programming, but in the end you're still writing a form of BASIC to make it actually do anything. Likewise for Flash and ActionScript.
If anything, these both go to my point. They are very much programmer tools, they just lower the bar to getting something on the screen so you can get to the hard parts of programming sooner. If you aren't computer literate, or refuse to become computer literate, you still won't get anything done with either of them.
OK, tools for the complete non-programmer maybe. Those are vaporware anyway. But tools for people with domain knowledge to do a little bit of programming were hugely successful. Visual Basic (pre .NET) is the best example. Click together a GUI, add a bit of Databinding, and write some business logic in BASIC. Spreadsheets are another, and they are a gateway drug to VBA. To a lesser extent the .NET ecosystem with XAML and so on falls into this category, too.
Another example was Flash. Artists could make little videos with the vector graphics tools (which are still pretty unique in how you can "paint" vector graphics). You could then animate them and make little movies, and add simple interactive features. Then you could add some ActionScript (~Javascript) to get more complex behavior and make litte games.
I'd say this kind of programming-language-light was hugely successful. Visual Basic, Access, and the likes, and the huge collection of commercial ActiveX controls was probably one of the most overlooked reasons for Microsoft's dominance in the late 90s. Millions of small businesses used MS products and small programs to generate reports, form letters, and so on. And the lasting legacy of Flash is probably the indy-gaming scene that is really successful nowadays (the other drive for that scene comes from mobile apps, which ironically was a main source of Flash's demise).
I don't know why this kind of programming tool slowly faded away. Maybe because people realized that it can cause huge maintenance headaches. Maybe because there is more supply of "proper" developers now. But I guess if someone built a decent IDE and allowed you to click together apps in a high-level fashion (and without boilerplate code!) and using Javascript or Python, it could be a success even today.