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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

I honestly think the child would be far better served with Scratch rather than some half-assed adventure writing language (having created several such languages myself).

Edit: To clarify, the languages I created were also half-assed - it's very difficult to create a good one.

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I'd say Canon and Scratch are different tools with different purposes. Both are simple and interactive enough for children to love. The main difference I see is that Canon abstracts away a lot of the game state management logic and you get to focus on creating characters, items and having lots of fun. Scratch looks like it has a steeper learning curve and while it is a good introduction to programming, it gets pretty hard to navigate once project size increases. As someone who started programming with Scratch, I think that making a text adventure game like the ones Canon does in Scratch would be much more complicated and the end result wouldn't be half as nice.

I think the only thing that matters is whatever the kid finds appealing enough to do at all.

e.g. I started with Ruby on Rails. Not even Ruby. The feedback loop is what convinced me that I wanted to write software and then dive into the fundamentals.

Scratch is so bad I think it must put kids off.

It makes zero sense to start people off in an actually bad programming environment.

Try Snap! Instead of Scratch.

My kids got bored and annoyed by Scratch very quickly.

Second this. Even the kid who later chose a programming career hated Scratch.

Also, it'd be far too low level in comparison to what the guy did - ultimately, this is a game engine. Proper comparison would maybe be against Inform 7.

Yeah, while reading I was thinking "why does he call it a MUD and not a text adventure"?

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