[side topic] The Scratch programming language and UI

[Mat]

Scratch is a programming language + environment made to make kids learn how to code. It is one of the most successful and recommended languages for this, and has been developed by MIT Media Lab in cooperation with LEGO among others for several years now. 

You code by visual drag'n dropping of code commands into a vertical sequence - a procedure - and using multiple such procedures to broadcast messages in between them, set variables etc, so to create interactive games or films or combos thereof. Pretty cool actually.

The code commands are grouped into eg; Motion, Events, Control, Sounds, Operators etc. One can also custom create commands and reuse procedures.

In a way it has a lot in common with TW; it is a simplified and high level coding language with a major aim of letting the users "build anything" without too much effort. Scratch very much succeeds in these aims thanks to its UI, i.e the drag'n drop, the "overviewability" of commands, the social sharing of "projects" - including tools to fork and build on other kids creations.

I think it is worth at least checking out (register) and get some ideas for TW UI dev that are very different from our current path.

<:-)

[Eduardo Caio João]

Hi mat! How are you?

great idea!

[Gene]

Well yeah ... but while you're contemplating the syntactic sugar of Scratch, consider Snap! which is a cleaner implementations.

But if one has to implement turtle graphics -- similar to SVG -- anyway, then why not provide turtle graphics sooner rather than later during any development cycle resulting in providing scratch/Snap! as the final goal?

If you contact Brian Harvey as one of the developers of Snap! you might test his interest level and willingness to help you implement Snap! functionality in a tiddler.