Next step: create a visual programming language that compiles to goboscript.
Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#22I 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…
I teach programming to designers and architects at the local university. We're using Processing quite successfully, because it skips a lot of steps. My daughters are too young and are still doing Scratch (with the great micro:bit). But I think next would be Processing, or Arduino with Micropython. But yes, typing is a problem. My older daughter inputs almost all her text via voice input. At work we're doing a lot of low code for new architectures. I think agentic low code tools for kids would be nice.
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#23I 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…
It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block? It would then be possible to incrementally write as little or as much as desired in text. Getting fancy, that block could use a backend interpreter/compiler of choice, so the language could be Squeak, Python, C, an LLM generator, ...
> It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block ?
That is the escape hatch from all visual development environments. Having seen Talend and W4 in action, I know the end state of the process: a single block with everything in it - I'm barely caricaturing here.
Maybe the specific needs of early learners will keep the system from degenerating too fast but, the moment code goes in that is not visually represented in the environment's visual paradigm, coherence goes downhill fast and one starts longing for properly managed scripts.
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#24I 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…
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#25[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#26I 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…
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#27I 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…
It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block? It would then be possible to incrementally write as little or as much as desired in text. Getting fancy, that block could use a backend interpreter/compiler of choice, so the language could be Squeak, Python, C, an LLM generator, ...
This is done rather well in TouchDesigner
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#28I 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…
The solution I built for this is Leopard. It is a Scratch → JavaScript converter. You can take an existing Scratch project and convert it to JavaScript code and then keep working, or use the Leopard library to create a new project from (ahem) scratch, following all the same conventions as a Scratch project.
Check it out! https://leopardjs.com/
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#29I 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…
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, because when kids want to make software they want to make UIs, they've never used CLIs to do fun things before.
It's also centered around automating desktop tasks. Moving the mouse, typing keystrokes, downloading or opening web pages, parsing the source, identifying windows on screen, moving them around, reading pixels, playing sounds...
Re: Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
#30I 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…
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 webmaster route in parallel it was the thing I spent most of my days in. (That, and making bootleg Windows XP builds just for fun, of course.)