As an animator, I've seen plenty of clip art for programmers, and always wished there could be clip programs for artists. Scratch is the first to do that and I think it will inspire others. A lot of great ideas have come from MIT and filtered into society. I like how you are sharing Scratch with the world.
I predict someday soon, Apple, who made desktop movies possible with iMovie and iDVD and desktop recording possible with GarageBand, will see a market for gamers who always wanted to make their own games. I bet Apple will see Scratch and make iGames. Like iMovie has Gee Three Slick Transitions plug-ins and GarageBand has libraries of instruments in their Jam Packs, there would be plug-ins for iGames to help produce sprites, and have templates for different genres of games. As a result, there will be more independent games, just as there have been more independent movies because of more powerful and inexpensive tools.
Forgive this turning into a blog. I just want to thank you at the Scratch team for your wonderful gift.
Offline
Very nice thought but would need a quite few more features added to provide any commercial thinking behind it, but as a spin on visual programming and an introduction to the same its an absolute delight, superb product for encouraging the first steps into what has become a very complex arena and a lot of young (and older) people have been put off by that complexity.
So if the future of programming is a highly visible scripting in bold colours for context for which the colours provide a logical association with the thought process then your right, I'm sure there will be competitive products from the majors very very soon.
I suspect the freebie is just the first step in attaining market share through volume understanding, much like shareware in fact. the difference here is everyone knows an m&m when they see one and from a marketising perspectice brand visualisation is everything. Hats off to the team at MIT.
Offline
Scratch is absolutely awesome! I'm amazed how easily my kids have picked it up.
I would love to see, though, how well kids could pick up a more functional language. I feel like I was corrupted by my exposure to BASIC as a child; wishing I has started with LISP instead :-) I think that a functional reactive language could be applied to the Scratch environment to great effect.
I thought it was funny that Hammination mentions that Apply should make "iGames". They're somewhat close with Quartz Composer. Completely drag'n'drop wiring up of blocks - very similar to Scratch - but purely functional.
I think with a restricted environment of sprites, backgrounds, etc. with a few properties like Scratch has implemented and with a hybrid IDE UI somewhere between Quartz and Scratch, but with a more "signal processing"-type approach to programming would be very, very interesting.
Then kids could learn to program with expressions instead of commands and grow up to be better programmers than my generation can hope for!
Offline
First of all, thank you MIT for this brilliant idea and a cool product! I was absolutely delighted when I first saw it. The presentation of language constructs as color-coded building blocks of different shapes is revolutionary. The language itself is simple but quite powerful, it combines traditional imperative constructs with the event-driven paradigm and even some advanced coding patterns.
As an IT professional though I'd like to point out some limitations of Scratch or features that would help it become a full-fledged programming language, without becoming too complex.
1) Data Types. Having only numeric variables/expressions is too restrictive. How about adding some basic string processing abilities, or even date/time processing?
2) Collections (Arrays). One dimension would be enough. Ideally, they would be able to grow.
3) Persistency/database. Could be as simple to the user as ticking a checkbox.
4) Communication (e.g. sending and receiving messages/data to/from other clients).
That's all for now. Looking forward to any feedback.
Offline