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Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

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Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#51

Post by WillAdams »

notpushkin wrote: post #30
sebstefan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a kid who didn't speak english I used the AutoIT language - not related to AutoHotKey It's a got a fully localized offline documentation embedded in a plug-and-play IDE designed to always compile & run your code with a single F5 press, no configuration needed The language itself is fully fledged but mostly revolves around things that kids already know. The tutorial makes you leave the CLI stage by chapter 5, becau…

I loved AutoIT as a kid! And it was also fun playing around with stuff like https://www.perfectautomation.com/ (nice to see that it’s now freeware, and the newer replacement project is completely free / open source!). But it was about the same time as I started digging around in Delphi 7, then discovered a RAD package pretty much exactly like Delphi, but with PHP instead (wild times), and as I was going down the webm…

Fortunately, for Delphi we have an opensource successor:

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43913414

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#52

Post by Retr0id »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #49
JamesSwift wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not OP) Scratch is great. Its an excellent first step. But you hit the limits fairly quickly for what is easy to do "reasonably". So you stay within the limits of what it does well and that limits the kinds of things you can do. And then you risk losing the kids interest to keep at it, if they become bored with the medium. I think Roblox is not a bad next step (tons of out of the box marketplace options), or Ive als…

Why not extend the language itself to have the features we want? Why turn it into text?

Making non-trivial things work in Scratch can be fun for similar reasons that it's fun to develop games for the NES in 2025, using modern tooling [0].

NES development would be easier if you upgraded the hardware to be more capable, but that would defeat the purpose. It could still be an interesting project in its own right, but it's not "solving" the same problem.

With Scratch, there are also fundamental practical limitations. Dragging stuff around with a mouse becomes a chore, once your code passes a modest size. Maybe you could invent a system of keyboard shortcuts, but that sounds even harder to use.

We already have mountains of excellent tools for working with text, from IDEs to git forges. It'd be really hard to build something competitive, for scratch blocks, from scratch.

[0] https://github.com/llvm-mos/llvm-mos-sdk

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#54

Post by igouy »

zozbot234 wrote: post #50
ninetyninenine wrote: post #43

Why is text preferable to scratch? What is fundamentally wrong with scratch to make this transition desirable?

Text is great for Git-based collaborative workflows. There's a reason why text-based programming languages are the standard today, and walled gardens like Smalltalk "images" and the old LISP machine environments have fallen out of use. Scratch is yet another walled garden.

> There's a reason why…

Incumbency advantage.

Free as-in beer versus commercial proprietary.

etc.

> walled gardens like Smalltalk "images"

Smalltalk has archived code in text files for like 40 years.

1984 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment" page 46

"Within each project, a set of changes you make to class descriptions is maintained. … Using a browser view of this set of changes, you can find out what you have been doing. Also, you can use the set of changes to create an external file containing descriptions of the modifications you have made to the system so that you can share your work with other users."

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...

    ~
Smalltalk can be written with MS Notepad, imported and incrementally compiled with fileIn, and run.

Using a designed for Smalltalk IDE will likely be more productive.

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#55

Post by varun_ch »

I got into coding through Scratch, and I've been involved with Scratch for over a decade now (I'm 18). I think an often overlooked aspect of Scratch is that it's more than just a drag and drop coding editor; there's an entire community site to share projects on too. And the site is super 'hackable', the APIs are fairly open and all of the client side code is open source too. There's a whole ecosystem of other kids building stuff for/around Scratch (like the Scratch Addons browser extension [0]), as well as projects like this.

To be honest, I learnt more from hacking Scratch than using it as intended. I thought this was just a 'me thing', but last summer I was an intern on the Scratch Foundation's engineering team, and my mentor explained that they're totally aware of this effect, and that they take it into account when designing the platform. I like Scratch.

[0] https://scratchaddons.com/

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#56

Post by notpushkin »

WillAdams wrote: post #51
notpushkin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved AutoIT as a kid! And it was also fun playing around with stuff like https://www.perfectautomation.com/ (nice to see that it’s now freeware, and the newer replacement project is completely free / open source!). But it was about the same time as I started digging around in Delphi 7, then discovered a RAD package pretty much exactly like Delphi, but with PHP instead (wild times), and as I was going down the webm…

Fortunately, for Delphi we have an opensource successor: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43913414

Lazarus is great and seems more stable than when I’ve last tried it. (~10 years ago, wow!) I don’t think I can come back to Pascal now, and I don’t really like this drag’n’drop GUI building method anymore, but it’s a great IDE otherwise!

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#57

Post by ninetyninenine »

Retr0id wrote: post #52
ninetyninenine wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not extend the language itself to have the features we want? Why turn it into text?

Making non-trivial things work in Scratch can be fun for similar reasons that it's fun to develop games for the NES in 2025, using modern tooling [0]. NES development would be easier if you upgraded the hardware to be more capable, but that would defeat the purpose. It could still be an interesting project in its own right, but it's not "solving" the same problem. With Scratch, there are also fundamental practical li…

Agreed.

Existing tooling is literally the only reason why.

But there is nothing inherently better about text.

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#58

Post by JamesSwift »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #49
JamesSwift wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not OP) Scratch is great. Its an excellent first step. But you hit the limits fairly quickly for what is easy to do "reasonably". So you stay within the limits of what it does well and that limits the kinds of things you can do. And then you risk losing the kids interest to keep at it, if they become bored with the medium. I think Roblox is not a bad next step (tons of out of the box marketplace options), or Ive als…

Why not extend the language itself to have the features we want? Why turn it into text?

Have you used Scratch before?

Its just inherent to the environment and use case I think. They are very focused on their mission of being a very quick to start platform for children learning to program in a visual language. They do a good job. There isnt a great solution for "whats next", and this (goboscript) could be that.

Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch

#60

Post by shakna »

gibolt wrote: post #13
AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #7

I love teaching Scratch to kids. Some years ago, I used to do "CoderDojo", which is like a hobby club where kids can learn programming. Some kids go to soccer, others to art academy — and these kids learn programming. Super cool to teach. However, most kids get stuck after they master Scratch. Especially kids around the age of 8–10. They learn Scratch. It's awesome. They make some advanced games and really get the ha…

This is how I learned a long time ago with Game Maker. Everything was Gui based, but you could also add code blocks to do more powerful things. Eventually, most things I built were nothing but code blocks.

Anecdote follows. The below matters little.

I did the same gradual move, and I can remember being excited to get home from school because I might have solved some problem by letting it tick over in my head.

But I do remember thinking GML was amazing (it was fugly, kid), and struggling with C, because the language was so different. (These days, leap to love2D and Lua instead).

Just the idea of multiple languages was so foreign and impossible to me. Writing a raycaster in GML was possible, writing an event loop in C was insane... And these days picking up a language tutorial for something new is a hobby.

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