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> I can't deny that there's something there that makes [Scratch] more accessible than other platforms Not for blind kids. Yes, maybe I bring up that kind of ac

> I can't deny that there's something there that makes [Scratch] more accessible than other platforms Not for blind kids. Yes, maybe I bring up that kind of accessibility too often, but using the word "accessible" was just asking for it. :) And seriously, that matters in a public school environment. Fortunately, using a haphazardly designed mainstream language like JavaScript isn't the only alternative. Check out Quorum: https://quorumlanguage.com/ https://quorumlanguage.com/

kazinator 5y ago
That looks like mind-numbing garbage that should be kept out of the reach of children.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Why, exactly? Because it appears too dumbed down for us experienced programmers, or is there a deeper reason? The Quorum team, which I'm proud to collaborate with when I have the chance, has evidence that their language works for beginners. They've been collecting that evidence over several years. I think their work deserves more than a shallow dismissal.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    All those type declarations, just yuck. In like the third tutorial page we learn about some cast() thing. This dialect of Fortran prepares kids for a world that mostly no longer exists.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > This dialect of Fortran prepares kids for a world that mostly no longer exists. This is a weird criticism, learning type declarations will not make someone worse at programming or rot their brain. It's mostly just syntax. As a point of comparison, Scratch doesn't let you assign object instances to variables. I just can't imagine getting worked up about type declarations in comparison to that. > for a world that mostly no longer exists. Also... casting no longer exists? I still do explicit casting in JS on occasion, and it certainly comes up in C-like languages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Rust even has implicit type coercion at all.
      - kazinator 5y ago
        Pardon me; if your goal is to prepare kids to be software engineers working in C-like languages and Rust, then that may be just the thing.
  - moltke 5y ago
    11 year old me would have hated it.
danShumway 5y ago
> Not for blind kids. That is a very good point, and yet another reason why it would be good for something else other than Scratch to take off (particularly in schools). I honestly am not 100% sure what makes Scratch click with people, my best bet is it's the community features, which are one of the few parts of Scratch I think are reasonably good. But it could be other stuff too. Quorum looks interesting, but I don't know if the problem is that mainstream languages like Lisp/JS/C are too complicated or if it's something else. I feel like both of my nieces would be capable of writing JS without too much trouble if they actually wanted to (but they don't and I'm not going to force them). I also vaguely feel like Scratch is straight-up harder to work with than JS for some problems. So I'm torn with whether the compromises it makes are helping it be popular, or if it's popular in spite of them. Scratch (on top of being a drag-and-drop block language) is also very visually oriented in the types of programs it encourages people to write. And that might be a contributing factor for its popularity with sighted kids, but obviously is not going to translate very well for blind/vision-impaired kids even if the interface itself was made more accessible. I strongly suspect Flash would have had the same problem back in the day (assuming that was accessible, which... I haven't checked but I also suspect it probably wasn't). I wonder if there could be some cool things that would be possible to do nowadays with pre-packaging a bunch of decent-quality sound effects in an engine or setting up some of the AI-driven voice tools that have been popping up online and letting kids start programming with them.

kazinator 5y ago

That looks like mind-numbing garbage that should be kept out of the reach of children.

mwcampbell 5y ago
Why, exactly? Because it appears too dumbed down for us experienced programmers, or is there a deeper reason? The Quorum team, which I'm proud to collaborate with when I have the chance, has evidence that their language works for beginners. They've been collecting that evidence over several years. I think their work deserves more than a shallow dismissal.
- kazinator 5y ago
  All those type declarations, just yuck. In like the third tutorial page we learn about some cast() thing. This dialect of Fortran prepares kids for a world that mostly no longer exists.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > This dialect of Fortran prepares kids for a world that mostly no longer exists. This is a weird criticism, learning type declarations will not make someone worse at programming or rot their brain. It's mostly just syntax. As a point of comparison, Scratch doesn't let you assign object instances to variables. I just can't imagine getting worked up about type declarations in comparison to that. > for a world that mostly no longer exists. Also... casting no longer exists? I still do explicit casting in JS on occasion, and it certainly comes up in C-like languages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Rust even has implicit type coercion at all.
    - kazinator 5y ago
      Pardon me; if your goal is to prepare kids to be software engineers working in C-like languages and Rust, then that may be just the thing.
- moltke 5y ago
  11 year old me would have hated it.

danShumway 5y ago

> Not for blind kids. That is a very good point, and yet another reason why it would be good for something else other than Scratch to take off (particularly in schools). I honestly am not 100% sure what makes Scratch click with people, my best bet is it's the community features, which are one of the few parts of Scratch I think are reasonably good. But it could be other stuff too. Quorum looks interesting, but I don't know if the problem is that mainstream languages like Lisp/JS/C are too complicated or if it's something else. I feel like both of my nieces would be capable of writing JS without too much trouble if they actually wanted to (but they don't and I'm not going to force them). I also vaguely feel like Scratch is straight-up harder to work with than JS for some problems. So I'm torn with whether the compromises it makes are helping it be popular, or if it's popular in spite of them. Scratch (on top of being a drag-and-drop block language) is also very visually oriented in the types of programs it encourages people to write. And that might be a contributing factor for its popularity with sighted kids, but obviously is not going to translate very well for blind/vision-impaired kids even if the interface itself was made more accessible. I strongly suspect Flash would have had the same problem back in the day (assuming that was accessible, which... I haven't checked but I also suspect it probably wasn't). I wonder if there could be some cool things that would be possible to do nowadays with pre-packaging a bunch of decent-quality sound effects in an engine or setting up some of the AI-driven voice tools that have been popping up online and letting kids start programming with them.