Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…
Wow. Thanks for posting! I’m curious of your thoughts on other visual programming languages. Specifically LabVIEW. My first job out of college was at NI where they heavily use LabVIEW. Every engineer in my cohort thought that paradigm was going to take off and over a decade later, it clearly hasn’t. One large factor is cost and proprietary tech, but I’m surprised few outside of the hardware testing world even know su…
One of the major issues with visual languages is not being able to find the right chunk. Yes there is a search feature, but if you don't know the right word to search you are doomed. In my time as a undergrad research assistant I was pumping out complex LabView code and VI's to control whole experiments. But I still would run into problems where I couldnt for the life of me find the block I needed. The most visceral of these was converting something like a double to single or vice versa. I went hunting for the correct block to do the conversion, which would take barely a line of code to do in C++ (the language I knew at the time), and it wasn't in the 'convert' subset of blocks.. I had this vast code that worked, but I couldn't get the last part of the data path completed because this missing stupid block that converts... Took me like an hour to eventually find it after trying everything including Google and NI's documents...
So stuff like that would be the main reason I think they never took off. If you have to hunt and peck trying to find the right box, instead of innately knowing the syntax to do something like converting. Well it just isnt practical, it's easier to lookup in a reference text for the language than to hunt in NI's closed garden crazy house.
That all said and done, LabView had some of the best Connectivity to lab hardware. Over a decade ago you could connect 2-5 devices from 1985-2000 through GPIB, and into your code assuming you had VI's (sometimes you have to make them yourself). It's hard to state how amazing that was, being Able to automate the control and data acquisition of hardware made during the infancy of the internet for research. It also made you quite valuable in your PI's eyes. So unlike most people I know from that era of my STEM career, I was one of the ones that said 'yeah I hate LabView .. . But man is it good at what it does." ... From conversation with grad students these days, it sounds like the libraries in python caught up on that front.