I was a little disappointed to see the lack of scratch adoption early on, but it needed a good deal of polishing. It's not being used by any schools that I hav

I was a little disappointed to see the lack of scratch adoption early on, but it needed a good deal of polishing. It's not being used by any schools that I have checked out, but the ideas that I first saw with scratch are widely used across all kinds of early education technology. I wouldn't say that anything like this is the future. RAD tools are fantastic, but they have their place. There's nothing that beats the performance and control of a low level language and they've all gotten better over the years with tooling (save assembly - which from my perspective has remained relatively stagnant). Still - the ability for non-programmers to get reasonably complex work done given a set of fundamental skills isn't just an inevitability, it's a necessary component for the next era. When the techies aren't bogged down with keeping tracking systems of all sorts up and running, they can focus on innovation that just isn't happening at the same pace that it once was. Kudos to the Scratch team for seeing the problem that's been glaring at us all since Logo disappeared and made a valiant effort at addressing it effectively. (I know... Logo didn't exactly disappear, but it has faded significantly)