Ah scratch. Some years ago I wanted to show what cool stuff you can do with computers to a 10y old boy. Found scratch and actually got hooked myself for a bit ^^. Ended up with this (slightly embarassing thing): http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/DeepDuh/941811. After programming a bit, the limitations become apparent big time. Google's idea to implement this as a Javascript parser is probably a good idea, this way some kids may make the bridge to the actual program. Also, it's probably way way better performing.
If you like visual programming, have a look at subtext. IMO this is the best idea for a visual programmig style, I hope it gets traction http://www.subtextual.org/.
That website is glorious :). Yeah, I think this might go a bit far. Scratch's community sadly isn't so big, further fragmentation won't help that much I think. And the platform doesn't make a very solid impression to me. That's why I like google's idea, I hope they pour some money into this.
Yep it seems like it has grown quite a bit since I've looked at it last time. I still think a platform like this should be bigger - as in a substantial fraction of school children big. Every child should try playing with something like scratch, just to see whether (s)he might like it and go into programming. When I was a child I went straight from some learning program for children with some graphical macro editor (poor man's hypercard) to VB6 and it led me to what I am now. That's why I think it's really important what toys we give to our children.
Indeed. I wrote a similar framework in Actionscript / Flex a few years ago, actually with a lot of input from the Scratch team. I've been thinking about porting it to JS recently. Glad to see someone beat me to it :)
Waterbear isn't a language like Scratch, it's a toolkit to create a Scratch-like visual programming interface to any language you like. There is active development on wrappers for Javascript, Java robotics, and Arduino.
Google also had App Inventor similar to that. I don't understand why they are building this. Didn't they just kill App Inventor because they wanted to "focus" or something? So why this now?
