Hacker News Reader

Comment by janwillemb | Hacker News Reader

Isn't scratch always in the browser? I'm confused.

No, when Scratch first came out it was a stand-alone Squeak Smalltalk image that you ran locally. There was a Java-based online viewer, but no editor.

Then it moved to a Flash version. If I remember right, this was at least somewhat motivated by vendors dropping Java support in the browser. Of course, at almost the same time the Flash version came out, vendors started dropping support for that.

The current one is written in JavaScript, I believe. Edit: it's still running Squeak, but using a JavaScript Squeak interpreter. See the top-level site for the given link.

To be clear, the current version of Scratch (version 3) is written in Javascript and other web technologies.

TFA isn't the current version of Scratch. It's Scratch 1.4—which was written in Smalltalk—running in a browser via Squeak.

If you've used modern Scratch, it's interesting to see what has changed (and what hasn't).

Ah, thanks. I must've missed a version or two somewhere along the way.

Scratch 2.0 did use flash. The version this site uses was based on smalltalk.

There was a Squeak web browser plugin early on so you could run Etoys or Scratch that way. Unfortunately they found out that schools had a very short list of browser plugins they allowed on their computers. Flash was included, Squeak was not. They failed to change that after years of trying.

This motivated the MIT guys to port Scratch to Flash (very bad timing) and the ex Squeak guys to focus on Javascript (Lively Kernel and other projects).

This is a very early version of scratch that was written in smalltalk. The current version is written in JS (desktop app is electron based)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com