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Comment by dangrover | Hacker News Reader

The UI for this reminds me a lot of Scratch from MIT.

Ah scratch. Some years ago I wanted to show what cool stuff you can do with computers to a 10y old boy. Found scratch and actually got hooked myself for a bit ^^. Ended up with this (slightly embarassing thing): http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/DeepDuh/941811. After programming a bit, the limitations become apparent big time. Google's idea to implement this as a Javascript parser is probably a good idea, this way some kids may make the bridge to the actual program. Also, it's probably way way better performing. If you like visual programming, have a look at subtext. IMO this is the best idea for a visual programmig style, I hope it gets traction http://www.subtextual.org/.

My niece was telling me about Scratch and how she knew what was wrong with other people's code and how she'd fix it.

I am so freaking proud.

You should be. I hope we will have some kids to show things like this some day ;).

have you tried BYOB [1]? It's "an advanced offshoot of Scratch"

[1] http://byob.berkeley.edu/

That website is glorious :). Yeah, I think this might go a bit far. Scratch's community sadly isn't so big, further fragmentation won't help that much I think. And the platform doesn't make a very solid impression to me. That's why I like google's idea, I hope they pour some money into this.

> Scratch's community sadly isn't so big

This might change your idea: http://day.scratch.mit.edu/

Scratch not so big ? ... http://scratch.mit.edu has over 2.5 million projects posted to it and over 1 million registered users !

Yep it seems like it has grown quite a bit since I've looked at it last time. I still think a platform like this should be bigger - as in a substantial fraction of school children big. Every child should try playing with something like scratch, just to see whether (s)he might like it and go into programming. When I was a child I went straight from some learning program for children with some graphical macro editor (poor man's hypercard) to VB6 and it led me to what I am now. That's why I think it's really important what toys we give to our children.

Indeed. I wrote a similar framework in Actionscript / Flex a few years ago, actually with a lot of input from the Scratch team. I've been thinking about porting it to JS recently. Glad to see someone beat me to it :)

Edit: Here's my old Actionscript library in case anyone is interested. https://github.com/trun/flashblocks

Yep, actually someone else (Dethe Elza) already beat you to a JS version: http://waterbearlang.com/garden.html?plugin=canvas

It was presented at JSConf last year: http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2011-dethe-elza-5942746

On the other hand, if you want to help contribute to Waterbear, it is an open community. The code is on github: github.com/waterbearlang/waterbear and the mailing list is here: http://lists.waterbearlang.com/listinfo.cgi/discuss-waterbea...

Waterbear isn't a language like Scratch, it's a toolkit to create a Scratch-like visual programming interface to any language you like. There is active development on wrappers for Javascript, Java robotics, and Arduino.

Have you seen this port of Scratch by the folks at Berkeley?http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html

It's not finished yet, but it sure beats MIT's attempt to port Scratch from Squeak Smalltalk to Adobe Flash...

Google also had App Inventor similar to that. I don't understand why they are building this. Didn't they just kill App Inventor because they wanted to "focus" or something? So why this now?

App Inventor is here now: http://www.appinventor.mit.edu/

You should've seen the enthusiasm of children during the International Scratch Day: http://day.scratch.mit.edu/ (Well, at least the ones I taught introductory programming using Scratch https://fatherinastrangeland.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/how-ca... )

Agree, here's the link http://scratch.mit.edu. Screenshot on the home page shows the blocks look very similar indeed.

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