Comment by jecel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jecel | Hacker News Reader

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It is great that Scratch can be used as an introduction to programming, but that is not why it was created. It was part of the MIT MediaLab "Computer Clubhouse"[1] project where it would be used to enable a remix culture of cute animations and even simple games. Scratch's implementer, John Maloney, had already helped create a programming environment for kids called EToys[2] using Squeak Smalltalk, just as in the first versions of Scratch (later rewritten in Flash and then in Javascript).

So the comments about how it is hard to do in Scratch something that would be trivial in Basic or some other language are not surprising. It is an animation system that allows you to use programming to increment that.

As others have pointed out, a system with the same visual as Scratch but design for actually programming is Snap![3] so it is just a matter of using the tools for what they were created to do.

[1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Clubhouse/Clubhouse.h...

[2] http://squeakland.org/

[3] https://snap.berkeley.edu/

> that is not why it was created. It was part of the MIT MediaLab "Computer Clubhouse"[1] project

> so it is just a matter of using the tools for what they were created to do.

Ah yes, the vaunted historic MIT culture of 'using things for what they were created to do.'

I enjoy using stuff for things they were not created for. In my HN profile I claim to be a hacker in the old sense of the word, and this is a big part of old style hacking.

But I am not then surprised when it takes a lot more effort than using something that had been created for that would take. For example, in 1983 I wrote a fancy Logo implementation using TI99/4A Extended Basic. It was far more complicated than the implementation I wrote in C. But the Basic version actually ran while the C version was just on paper since I didn't have access to any computers with C at the time.

I think it is great that people end up doing in Scratch things that you would expect would need Python or something like that. But if some 5 line Python program becomes a monster in Scratch, that is to be expected. The opposite is also true: a 5 line Scratch program might take pages of Python to replicate.

I’m not really sure what you’re pushing back against here — are you taking issue with the terminology? Or are you saying that scratch should not be used as an intro to programming logic because it was originally designed to control visual components fairly superficially?

He’s explaining the origins of why it’s bad at certain things: because it wasn’t originally designed as a general purpose tool. That’s the whole point of his comment, nothing else is implied

Apparently sqeakland has a stored CSRF issue, because it pops an alert in the comment section with "you are sex".

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