181–190 of 397 posts
They're selling it short - it's the largest coding community full stop. "As of 15 February, 2023, community statistics on the language's official website show more than 123 million projects shared by over 103 million users, over 804 million total projects"[1] Compare to GitHub: "As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories"[2] Of course, the average Scr…
Is scratch counting remixes in the total projects? I doubt Github is counting folks. Also sharing raw user count doesn't mean much. I have a suspicious github deletes far more bot accounts than scratch does and really we should care about something like MAU which takes into account retention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many kids created several user profiles. Most of the times when they "level up" and for example "learn functions" (custom blocks), instead of create new projects with the learning old ones they create a new user profile so I would at least divide 103 million users by two.
Anecdotally, I have at least 3 GitHub profiles
Even for confirmed email addresses, Scratch is super lax in terms of what they'll accept. My company (a childrens' coding enrichment program) probably has upwards of a thousand Scratch accounts attached to a single gmail via "+" aliases, and Scratch doesn't care at all.
I find Scratch so confusing. So many menu options, drop downs , select here click here. Very frustrating experience. I don't think my child (8 years old) learns coding from it. I'm trying to find away to introduce him to Basic. But he looses interest once he sees just lines. Scratch is flashy and things can be moved and clicked which is what the kids are used now, but I just don't see any educational or fun value add…
This hits me deeply. I do not have kids, even not married. But when/if they will appear I will manage to disallow any GUI on the territory of my house for everybody including me (I hope old Nokias will still be a thing at that time for having ability to communicate or it will not work). Then a child will look at the lines as at the most interesting thing in the house and maybe starts going a GNU/Linux hacker way as early as some greatest mathematicians have started their math careers.
I respect such thing as Scratch and any of his competitors, but let's be honest, gentlemen - games is a misusing of computer and the lines is what matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Microsoft needs to do here is to include a stripped down IM inside Excel, a blend between MS Teams and Chatroulette, but with a twist: it will upload what you're working on to Bing to take a look at, group you with others whose Excel sheets are closest to your in the latent space, and connect you all in a group chat. Like magic, fluid, self-associative communities.
I can see why this got down-voted, but seeing this in fruition would be quite interesting. Of course, this would probably require sharing internal corporate data which is a big no-no.
1. Edges in node-based programming get tangled easily and it becomes hard to read. Scratch has no visual edges: the pieces snap together, making it easy to visually follow the flow.
2. Having to manually drag nodes around is a chore. Scratch does automatic layout within individual functions.
3. Some node-based systems use colors to distinguish types. This is inherently less readable than the different shapes that Scratch uses.
4. Scratch is structured programming, unlike node-based systems which are essentially based on GOTO.
5. Visual programming systems based on nodes have no easy way to step up to text-based programming languages, unlike Scratch which follows the form of standard source code. This is largely because of (4): nodes are based on GOTO, which is not how modern programming languages work.
† Node-based programming is more defensible when there's no control flow, such as with common shaders, but I still think it'd be worthwhile to try something like Scratch in this domain, perhaps modified a bit to better visualize "pipeline" workflows.