Friday, March 29, 2013

Scratch (programming language) in HTML5

Steve Jobs is still widely influential. Because he "killed" Flash,
even open source projects for kids are moving to HTML5.

MIT Media Lab has developed a nice tool for teaching kids programming, Scratch.
Like lego blocks, where each program statement has a visual "block".
Arrange blocks, and this makes program.

At begging it was a portable desktop tool, and with Web intent was to move it to Flash,
as an interactive / "multimedia" tool.
Popularity of iPad has changed MIT plans, since it "must run there".
So it is now ported to HTML5. Nice :)

beta.scratch.mit.edu

Scratch (programming language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Scratch 2.0

HTML5 Scrath Editor / Run

Reference Guide

Source Code
Scratch is written in Squeak, an open-source implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language.
(The syntax and runtime behaviour of the Objective-C programming language is strongly influenced by Smalltalk.)


Alternatives to Scratch

BYOB/Snap!: BYOB is an advanced Scratch Modification with lambdas, first class data, procedures, recursion, and many other features. Version 4.0 was renamed Snap! and was rewritten in JavaScript, and is thus no longer considered a Scratch modification.

blog: Elegant Code

Interesting blog site contributed by multiple developers

Elegant Code