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Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

Having already known how to code, I gave Scratch a shot after hearing about it. I know I'm not the target audience, but despite "looking" friendly I found it very complex and not very intuitive at all. If the goal is to ultimately learn programming with industry standard tools, I think the time would be better spent learning those tools and fundamentals rather than becoming comfortable with Scratch and trying to transition to them.

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I found the same. Then I watched kids using it by following instruction sheets, picking up the concepts, tweaking, making their own projects, and moving on to Python.

I got to understand Scratch by learning how kids use it. It’s just a mindset and expectation shift that is similar to that I experience when learning anything new. When I first learned a proper functional language after years of imperative. When I used a game dev environment that does lots for you.

It is definitely a hard switch to make when you're used to being able to just _write_ what you want, rather than having to go look for the block and drag it into place. :)

> If the goal is to ultimately learn programming with industry standard tools

It has variables, if, else, different kinds of loops, event handlers... Of course it still isn't "real" programming, but it does teach some basic concepts of it, while still being relatively easy for a child to use.

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