I love the idea behind scratch, but I've found the implementation to be a bit lacking at times. It's buggy in ways, the support for variables is quite basic and difficult to use, and there's just a lot of rough edges around stuff that should work like copy/paste and shared functions.
Perhaps we just need to focus some open-source energy on it.
Yeah it could use help. Scratch is really just a heavily modified version of Disney's flavor of Smalltalk. I think it was called Squeek.
To continue the conversation it's important to remember the environment that Hypercard was born in: there was no Python, Ruby, or Javascript. The major alternatives were just C or C++ (right?). That is no longer the case. Consequently I'm not really sure it needs to be reborn.
Squeak is a modern, full-featured Smalltalk. It is closely related to Pharo, a cleaner, leaner fork. (Both of these put mainstream languages like Java to shame.)
Scratch is simply a kid-friendly DSL built in Squeak. Big difference!
Perhaps we just need to focus some open-source energy on it.