Scratch

Draggin gbuilding blocks around is great for beginning programmers, but it is slower and more likely to lead to carpal tunnel syndrome than typing, so is not likely to be much of an aid to professional programmers.  The blocks also take up more screen space per command, so large progams are harder to read.  It's a great teaching tool, but not a great development tool (the two are not at all the same thing).

I am a business software developer.  While I can see your point, CAPAT, I don't think it would be as useful as you are saying.

If there were to be a "drag n drop" entity for any construct available to me in VB.NET, for example, I would spend way too much time looking for the right block, and productivity (yes, project managers care about productivity    ) would go WAY down.

Now, that is not to say that using visual tools can't help with the development process.  UML (or any other form of logic modeling) can be a great tool for defining data/logic/business flows.  And there are plenty of tools that will convert the UML models into workable objects with their methods and properties defined for you.

But I think that is where it should stop.  Dragging a "class" object onto a page, and then applying properties to it to give me code like:

Public Class MyClass
  Private _myProp As String
  Public Property MyProp As String
    Get
      Return _myProp
    End Get
    Set (value as String)
      _myProp = value
    End Set
  End Property
End Class

... would be (and is, with Visual Studio's Class Designer for example) very useful. But having to drag 4 blocks to have code like

    x = y+2

would become VERY tedious indeed.

So while this tool is AMAZING in an academic learning setting, it would absolutely not work (at least to this granularity) in a business setting. 

</soapbox>

Mike.

Last edited by mdusoe (2007-07-14 10:25:26)

The input time for a scratch program is far longer than for a corresponding keyboard-entry program.  It is great for beginners, but experienced programmers would quickly get frustrated with the slowness of a mouse-based interface, and would be in danger of repetitive stress injuries (already a major occupational hazard).

The interface is good for beginners of all ages, but is not likely to replace existing development environments for professionals.  One of the programs that I work on a lot is over 77000 lines of c++ code (over 85% of which I wrote).  While I love scratch as a teaching tool, I could not imagine having to do a big program in it.  The interfaces that are appropriate for building toy programs and for building big programs are just not the same.

To paraphrase Samuel Goldwin (I think) - once you have "an opportunity to tear away all the (fake) mystery" surrounding programming, what you're likely to see is the "real mystery" underneath - namely how difficult computer programming actually is in most "real world" situations and how amazing it is that things works as well as they do.

Just to take Kevin's example - if he can generate code at 100 lines an hour (an amazing productivity rate - even with extensive reuse), just writing 77,000 lines of C++ code would require almost half of a person-year.  After that (or actually in parallel) there is debugging, application and reliability testing, documentation (occasionally), etc., etc. 

Finally, just when a project is close to completion, someone comes up with new hardware, a new basic algorithm, a better (but totally different) interface - or all of the above - and you start over.  (As a specific example, this last was exactly what happened to a lot of programs when Pixar introduced efficient subdivision modeling for 3D animation.)

It's probablly this last fact that has doomed most "simplification" efforts over the years - if you wait the added cycle for the "simplification" tool - your own product will be well behind that of someone who chose to do it "the hard way." 

Not to say that simplification isn't a worthy goal - and certainly a successful effort would be applauded by all - but don't invest your life savings in such a project. (I might be able to find some Thinking Machines stock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation ) if you'd like an example as a warning - it will make pretty wallpaper.)

As far as doing an animated GIF - one of the easiest free programs around (IMO) is Benton Movie GIF available at http://software.benetonfilms.com/Beneton_Movie_GIF/.  In addition to providing the tools, the user interface makes actually creating the animation a fairly straightforward process. However, it's not the most powerfull program around - I'm sure there will be other recommendations of tools that are much more powerfull - and much more difficult to master.

By posting this topic, I expected more possitive replies ! Because there may be number of people who like to design his/her own programms with a programming language like "Scratch Java".

Is there a way to contact Scratch Team directly ?

A couple of interesting and rather fun sites - thay may also illustrate one of the points (complexity) that I was trying to make in an earlier posting.  Also, as a serious note, I think providing examples of interesting Scratch programs translated to other programming languages is a good idea - the question I have is which translations would give the highest payback?

http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm shows how to write the classic "Hello World" program in 330 programming languages.  The site also translates the phrase "Hello World" into 57 different human languages (imagine just the font management problem) and has a phonetic guide for the phrases when the Roman alphabet isn't used (in case you want to add text-to-speech).

A couple of interesting notes - there are five different dialects of Java listed - plus Java Script which is only remotely related to the Java programming language.  Also Scratch (and Squeak and Etoys) are not listed. (The same language difficiency also occurs in another list, http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/ , which claims to have examples of 1103 different languages. It only has four Java dialects but includes two versions of J Script in addition to Java Script.)

Last edited by DrJim (2007-07-15 19:34:15)

Hi, Im a pofessional architect/developer and work in the areas where different industry participants have widly different levels of IT capabilities. I have previously developed drag drop languages that share many feastures of Scratch, and feel that scratch represents a very good evolutionary step for non-it specialists struggling to develop code.

My approach has been to take the picture and generate C# code from it, then roll that into "normal" code. Id be interested to know if there is a way to seperately use scratch as a component and extend the scratch interface for use as a code generator for non-it people.

I understand the point about not wanting to write 77,000 lines of C# using scratch, but many of these people struggle to get the syntax for < 50 lines, and that I think a scratch like interface could be of great assistance to them.

Thanks

Hi Jim

Not quite, Scratch as a scripting tool. The ability for Scratch to be an add on to an application, so that the script fragments direct the operation of the underlying application.

.NET is able to compile link and run .NET languages on the fly, enabling it to be a scripter. Thus scratch looks like its interpreted by the application. Just as Scratch programming runs the sprite.

So many discussions, indeed.

But I do believe that <liveisnow> has pointed out something that is often neglected over the shiny 'playing-with-blocks' UI: That Scratch is a *dynamic* language, in which you can actually keep coding while your project is live and running (!) You just don't have to "compile, link, and run". That's why the Scratch blocks aren't just an easy way of producing code, but controls to directly manipulate a running project.
This is something you just cannot accomplish with an early-binding language like all the C-flavors out there. There is plainly no way to 'remix' a running C-based application. In fact, it's not 'remixing' at all, more like reproducing the whole application from its various 'sources' and 'resources', that you do in C-like languages. And that's IMO precisly where Scratch is *completely* different.

So the question to me is not so much weather draggable blocks make for easier coding, but weather they resemble real components of a project/an application. Therefore I personally see no use for draggable blocks-interfaces to conventional languages. It's the combination of blocks and a late-binding / interpreted language that's the real inovation.

I agree with vikaros, however, that such code usually doesn't scale well, and is often downright ugly. Maybe a way to cope with this would be to allow for 'nested' blocks which could be 'expanded' or 'zoomed into'.

But that's another different discussion!

Last edited by Jens (2007-08-22 10:22:36)

The Scratch IDE is written in Squeak Smalltalk, the online version is done in Java. You can have a look at how Scratch is implemented by following these instructions:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/22355
Also, you might want to have a look at the corresponding forum thread:
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=953
If you know about Smalltalk you can (in theory) modify the current Scratch implementation, but I wouldn't recommend it just yet...

Last edited by Jens (2007-08-23 03:38:03)

budhajeewa wrote:

Scratch is a good work and I think the best work I have seen in this field. How ever, I have a suggession for you people, who develop "Scratch". It is good if you write a programm to make Java or Visual Basic (I mean any programming language) programms with your revolutionary "BBT" (Bilding Blox Technolofy). This may be the best help ever to the application programmers all over the world and they all will thankful to you.

I hope that you will soon take a action for this, and I hope a reply from you to [THERE'S AN E-MAIL HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!].

Thanks!

mXsoft11 wrote:

budhajeewa wrote:

Scratch is a good work and I think the best work I have seen in this field. How ever, I have a suggession for you people, who develop "Scratch". It is good if you write a programm to make Java or Visual Basic (I mean any programming language) programms with your revolutionary "BBT" (Bilding Blox Technolofy). This may be the best help ever to the application programmers all over the world and they all will thankful to you.

I hope that you will soon take a action for this, and I hope a reply from you to budhajeewa@gmail.com.

Thanks!

The player is java, so normal scratch IS scratch java.

I think he's talking about the main Scratch application, which is Squeak. Regardless, this topic is quite old and we would really appreciate it if you wouldn't bump up topics like this unless it's a particularly riveting point. Besides, since Scratch is being rewritten in Flash anyways, I will close this.

Last edited by coolstuff (2010-08-17 17:22:30)