Why I Believe Scratch Is the Future of Programming

What's described in the article is indeed true, you can build stuff without syntax, you can extend it, etc.

But who is this for? I am not a fan of the "Let's teach everyone to code" rhetoric, because this is same as "let's teach everyone to play the piano", or "Let's teach everyone to be good at math!". People who will code will code even if you don't push them to. And most others, well they have other better things to do in their lives like making art, becoming a scientist, or becoming a doctor.

With this type of "programming", I think their trouble is they don't know who they're building this for. Here's what actually happens:

1. People who want to do serious programming will immediately find out how inefficient this method is compared to "writing syntax", and switch to real programming.

2. People who are hobbyists will find that it's not so hard to learn "real programming" once they get into programming.

3. People who want to learn to program to get a job, will of course learn real programming

4. People who want to build things but can't learn programming languages will maybe use this to write a prototype, but then immediately hire a "real programmer" once they see any sign of taking off.

5. The "education" purpose is also out of touch too. If I wanted to teach my kid how to program I would teach him python. It's not that hard.

6. Most other people won't and shouldn't care about coding. There are thousands of other interesting things to do in life.

I am all for making it easier to build things, and I appreciate that they built this so the world can experience what it feels like to try something like this, but I really can't see any possible use case for this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratchpad_memory

My son can not really read yet, so for that stage scratch (or rather, Snap, which works without Flash) is fine. But for more complex things I imagine it will get inconvenient quickly.

What is nice is to have a display of the available commands. I actually learned programming on a ZX Spectrum, which had all the available Basic commands available on the keyboard (reachable with different key combinations). For learning that was great, as it also sparked my curiosity ("what does command x do?").

So maybe that could be emulated somehow - blocks are just one way to show the available commands.

Apart from that, I also find the Scratch environment not very intuitive to use. It's very confusing to me that there are no start, stop and pause buttons. But granted, that is one thing that can be overcome with experience (I googled that basically you have to reset state programmatically at the start of your program).

That's why I said if I was teaching my kid to code I would teach python. It's easier to learn, copy and paste (for instant gratification), and it is an actual programming language. I really can't see where this Scratch thing has any benefit over these other languages.

When I tried teaching him Python however, his spelling and typing skills held him back significantly. It took him almost a minute to type 5 words.

Unfortunately, this is becoming more common, as more kids are growing up without using a computer much at all, in favor of tablets and smartphones.