I learned to program on scratch in the 6th grade when it was very new, circa 2008. In many ways, it is more real than other learning languages.
In retrospect, the smalltalk influence of scratch I think left such an impression on me that I continue to love dynamic, always live environments to this day. The broadcast system is surprisingly powerful and forward thinking. I do recall it being a bit difficult to build up your own abstractions, but such guardrails I think are useful for learning and I usedd Scratch before custom blocks were available.
anyone else just define a function log(msg) the prints to stderr or maybe stdout and use that instead for simple programs/daemons? I never really got the big value proposition of seven-leveled logging or the complexity of it. If I need to customize it I just change my log function.
Thanks you very much for the support, I can totally understand that position.
We have been making great progress in terms of features since then to "flesh out" the languages and libraries including threading support, an event loop, and some basic networking (socket) support built in to the runtime. Generally though, the PL design space is already incredibly fatigued an most new languages claiming something have already been made a few times over, just doing doing one thing slightly better, so it is true we cannot truly compete in that space.
Janet is a hobby lisp(?) taken too far and I have been adding lots of features that I find useful for day-to-day programming and experiments while still being something "embed-able" into another project. Janet is not a corporate project in anyway and donations are accepted mostly as a token of gratitude and expenses used to maintain the website and CI bills. My goal is really just to make it a good, clean, useful language for my own use and not as some kind of advertisement or product for anything, it is a project I started in my college dorm and have continued working on as a passion project since.
In retrospect, the smalltalk influence of scratch I think left such an impression on me that I continue to love dynamic, always live environments to this day. The broadcast system is surprisingly powerful and forward thinking. I do recall it being a bit difficult to build up your own abstractions, but such guardrails I think are useful for learning and I usedd Scratch before custom blocks were available.