Ask HN: Did any of you first encounter programming through Scratch?

Logo, with the turtle, was my academic intro to programming. I already knew some basic by that time because my mom had bought me a book titled "Kids and the Commadore" IIRC. I tried scratch once when I was like 30 and thought hmm, minecraft and garys mod are more interesting.

Scratch wasn’t my first “encounter” per say, but I did write my first non-trivial program with scratch. Everything else before that was just tinkering.

In high school (2010s) I was familiar with programming from the outside in. I remember knowing that Ruby on Rails was a big thing. I had tried to learn ruby a handful of times and got lost in the process. I was super excited about wine because it helped me play boot leg video games on my old MacBook. I liked to try and read about how wine worked, but it was way over my head.

Enter scratch: the first real program I wrote was a scratch game in a high school computer science class called “glub run”! It was a little Mario like side scroller in which a little green blob (the glub) would run along the and try to get little coins.

It was a lot of work to get it all setup, and definitely went way beyond what was expected of us for the class, but I just had so much fun with it! Building a whole interactive 2d world from just a bunch of linear gui code blocks was mind bending to me. To be honest, the block based gui code was more of a hindrance than a help.

That was pretty much the extent of my time with scratch, we quickly moved to using a canned version of Java with some other little GUI attached. To be honest, it took me a long time to write another program of that same complexity as glub run. Maybe it was my magnum opus.

Why was scratch so great: Reflecting on it now, the best advantage of scratch was that there was no setup involved. You just clicked new and were off and going! (This is what I imagine BASIC was back in the day). Every other programming language had way too much fluff around it that made it really hard to get started. You needed a system for managing dependencies, you needed a system for managing versions of the language, then everyone said you needed all these libraries to go with the language. As a beginner, it was a total non-starter. For the longest time, I didn’t understand where the lines were between the language, the framework, and the tooling. Scratch avoided all of that and let you actually just build a program!

So even though I never returned to it, scratch is where the rubber hit the road for me so to speak! First time I had that feeling that I could actually create something novel with software! Been happily programming for the petter part of the last decade since!

this is what i'm designing aesthetic.computer for!

C++ for me, but I'm old