Scratcherific

My friend Franco Travostino calls Mitch Resnick "the Steve Jobs of the under age computer human interface", since my kids started building programs in Scratch last year, I've been gobsmacked by how powerful, expressive and drop dead simple to use Scratch is. 

Besides the ridiculously easy to program environment, there's at least one other major difference in how Scratch approaches programming and how programming is typically taught. Bill de hÓra recently mentioned this disctintion

Applications traditionally changed faster than relational data, but social data changes faster than applications

This is quite a different way from how we typically approached building applications, now there is another dynamic layer (social data) on top of the app, Scratch is built from the get go to be remixed across applications, users and projects. Another win for the digital natives.  

Comments

[Iang (my War on SQL)]

Huh. A revolution is overdue in data. Time to take the sword to the relationalists. Let blood run in the streets, again.

[Jeff Williams]

Scratch is wicked cool. My kids were writing multithreaded games in minutes. Visual programming like this (and MindStorms) are incredible ways to handle complexity. See GreenFoot and Alice for some of this in Java - I found them very prototypish, but interesting.

If you get a chance to read Resnick's Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams - it's fantastic. Examples using StarLogo. We've got a lot to learn.