This is the sort of feedback that makes me cry (in the good way). It was extremely rewarding to have MIT students show up at our group and talking about what effect Scratch had on them and how it helped them make their way to MIT.
I made use of LabVIEW around 2002-2005 and I liked it, working on systems to measure the length of fiber optics down to the femtosecond (it's amazing what you can do with differential wave form/phase analysis), which was then used to write custom C++ code to do these measurements in real-time at a millimeter wave interferometer, enabling the ability to do real-time adjustment to the sample phases for any fiber that was being heated/expanding in the sun.
LabVIEW allowed us to make a very quick demonstration of this as a working concept. Which illustrates what I believe is the most powerful thing about visual programming environments. They can excel at demonstrations and full working solutions without including the parts of computation that are social constructions (language syntax, data structure access and limitations, ...).
I am not convinced that the idea of a "killer language" will happen. While there is a through-line of abstraction heaped upon abstraction, I am unconvinced that these first 60 years of computation in society are going to be visibly recognizable another 60 years from now.
OR!
Linus Torvalds will invent a language that takes over everything, based on how git has consumed almost the entire space of source code management systems (a sociological phenomena/opinionated work flow process) and the success of GNU/Linux more generally.
"...lacking any ability to create a space where they could build and learn to code in private."
Correct, this is by design, the way to go for the private/no on-line community aspects would be to use the downloadable stand-alone Scratch editor. Based on the self-selecting group of users who agree to send back telemetry usage for the stand-alone editor, we believe that over half of all Scratch users are only using the stand-alone editor. Last year this was somewhere in the range of ~100-150 million individuals worldwide.
On the website, we regularly evaluate how we can downplay the worst aspects of a social network, such as, not showing the exact count of certain indicators of likes/stars/views in various areas of the site (e.g. showing 100+ vs 203, etc.)
Me too! I have had various toy projects that make use of the open source Scratch editor to do this exact thing and writing extensions that would enable this. While our our extension system can enable this, we are very careful about adding extensions to the live site that might enable a project to spam connections and inadvertently creating a DDoS system.
Given our limited resources, we have translated the tutorials (both the spoken language and the written words in the videos as appropriate) into a subset of the languages that Scratch has been translated into (> 50 languages). The tutorials themselves have been translated into Spanish, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Turkish, and more. This includes both the spoken words and the written ones. The specific updates to enable this were done in the last two years, so perhaps your experience was prior to that work?
One of my favorite things to show off is switching between Right→Left languages vs Left→Right languages, I encourage everyone to try it! These translations are also a struggle. It adds a lot of extra data to the downloadable and standalone Scratch application and we cannot assume that there will be a network connection available to enable a just-in-time download approach.
Thank you! I also grew up around the time of HyperCard and BASIC on PCs, and spent hours carefully typing in programs from magazines. I can look back on that and find a lot of warm memories. I can also look at it with a critical eye and question how much I would have learned about general computation principles if there was something like Scratch available during that time period.
No, thank you! I really mean this, your feedback matters to us as we are continuously working on accessibility issues with both presentation and usability.
Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend...
Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from (https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...) and was used by the Lego Group when branding those products, and our philosophy is heavily influenced by that.
I can say that the https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/ are real and we have a substantial footprint of backend services and custom software to support it. We handle on the order of 15-20 million comments/month.
The primary design philosophy is:
Passion: You have a strong interest in a subject/problem to solve/explore
Projects: Build something based on your passions, gain directly interactive experience with it.
Peers: Share your work with folks who are interested and provide feedback to you
Play: It should be fun!
Note that there is nothing in there about STEM/STEAM nor application development. We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding/entry. Having said that, the complexity of what Scratch can do rises sharply the more you work with it and the concepts behind "forking" and opensource are built in via the remix ability on individual projects.
A lot of design thinking goes into the frontend of Scratch to build on a creativity feedback loop that is not focused on learning Python or any other specific language (or the syntax of them, i.e. avoid "why isn't my program working... oh, one too many tabs... or maybe this semi-colon, or maybe this .")
Another part I think is worth raising, the Scratch frontend is a sophisticated virtual machine interpreter that has it's own machine code and model that is executing in a Javascript environment in browser and it is still open source. Google's Blockly project was based on the ideas of Scratch 1.4 and when we ported Scratch 2 away from being Flash based, we partnered with the Blockly group to fork their code base and create Scratch Blocks.
Based on the TIOBE index, we're usually somewhere in the top 20 most popular "programming languages". _eat it Fortran!_
Given the nature of how twitter has influenced elections, why would this be extreme? So far the known targets all appear to be of a particular political persuasion, but I haven't seen a comprehensive list yet.