Scratch

thanks Jens

yes, i've had a little dig into Squeak and see how - in principle - the blocks get mapped to Smalltalk commands; ran your project on adding new commands as well 

i understand that the blocks per se are the commands in scratch - and thats the idea of it

but i still think offering an *optional*  textual view of commands, within Scratch itself, in a more scripty / procedural manner, might  give scratch a bit more 'height'  -
ie would make a nice scaffold if you could see how the blocks were being translated into some sort of script - (not smalltalk itself) - which you could also write with, and see switch back and see how the blocks had changed / grown

being able to switch modes there might really launch some kids beyond Scratch this as well ..

Copied off my thread:

N-Wear wrote:

Ok, I have the scrach squeak code up and running, but I'm not that familer with small talk. I know Just-Basic* and tried to enter the date and time code:

Code:

time$

Code:

date$

But it didn't work. Is there a time and/or date code for small talk? Thanks!!

*Just-Basic: A simple programing language. http://www.justbasic.com/

Last edited by N-Wear (2008-05-26 18:02:45)

Hi Jens,

Interesting discussion. I've only just started playing with Scratch.

Jens wrote:

Having a more "typable" version of Scratch is a wish I have read often in the starting days of Scratch, and it still comes up sometimes, so I guess there's some demand here. Did you know that you can write a "project summary" to disk (by shift-clicking on the Extras button), which contains all the scripts in a readable sort of pseudo code format? The problem is, you can't get this "summary code" back into Scratch. That's one of the reasons I have been experimenting with converting Scratch scripts to XML.

... [Scratch] is basically syntax-free, meaning as long as two blocks fit together you don't have to worry about syntax at all.

I see what you mean. I look forward to having time to look into your work in this area. I have pondered this stuff while enjoying playing with the nice slick Scratch user interface with my enthusiastic young kids (surely, neither of whom share my following thoughts).

Firstly, typability in Scratch would be great. But perhaps just a full-featured keyboard-capable interface would mostly fix things for me. How could you make Scratch possible without a mouse? That's actually what I first thought you meant when you said typability but having read your XML reference I assume you mean in the sense of a textual representation.

Secondly your comments make me think about surface syntax. I think the spirit of a programming language ("what it wants to be", "how it changes how you think" etc.) is sometimes obscured to outsiders by surface syntax and this can be a marketing hurdle that designers try to avoid by being more conventional for the target audience (e.g. C++, Java) at that surface level.

So too has the Scratch project focused a huge amount of effort on surface syntax; making friendly toy-like blocks that are only controlled by the mouse. Kids with no programming experience are the target audience. But there is still a syntax and there are still syntax errors. You can't leave certain holes in your expressions and the fact that the editor constraints have such clear rules about the executability of what constitutes an atomic act of composition does not mean that there is no syntactical model. It's just more difficult to create syntax errors. (However that famous Noam Chomsky quote shows syntatically correct nonsense is easy: "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.").

But this block syntax isn't the essential Scratch language, it's only a notation for it. An alternative is implemented in this very forum!

Finally I am interested in your use of XML as a representation format. No doubt you selected it for the same reason everyone else does - the surface syntax is parsed for free. But it isn't my idea of typeable!

An interesting article about XML in this context of surface syntax is actually what got me (re)thinking about this stuff. It's by Martin Fowler (ex-Smalltalker & Pattern pundit) and it's about the disproportional resistance developers have to using a DSL/minilanguage with a custom syntax even when it would suit the domain better than, say XML. I found it an interesting read:

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/ParserFear.html

Also I read somewhere that the typical angle brackets are not essential to XML, that it is only one (dominant) notation for it. I am led to believe that there are alternate (more typeable) notations available. You can probably easily imagine such possibilities.

Finally, thanks for your evident work in opening the world of Scratch+Squeak to newcomers like me. I really appreciate it.

Christo.

How come i cant get it? <stop all sounds>   

Other than just flip, are there any other block making tutorials that maybe focus more on the different codes for effects?

MITscratcher wrote:

Thank you for your help, I had just figured it out last night. I had already downloaded "Squeak", and I may only be a kid, but I did learn a lot about it. My ambition is to go to MIT when I go up (and to become a programmer). Do you think smalltalk will be a good language for me to start with to learn and work my way up to more advanced programing?

Me Too!

Does anybody know how the default sprite in the scratch source code can be replaced? I'm doing some experiments and I need to have a different sprite without replacing it by hand all the time.

http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/source seems to be down, but the 1.2.1 code is still up at http://scratch.mit.edu/files/source-code/ScratchSource1.2.1.zip

-a.

Hey JSO- the source for 1.3.1 was recently released, maybe that will help!

http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/source

hi jcubed- here's how to run scratch in source code version:

- click on the gray empty area to get a "world" menu
- click "open..."
- click "Scratch"

How do i open which program all i see is scratchsourcecode.image

I made a previous costume block