Tried out Scratch

I tried out Scratch tonight.  It looks pretty easy to use and it can do some interesting things.  Unfortunately it doesn’t have an XOR operation!  I can write my own using (A . !B) + (!A . B) or similar but I’d prefer to wrap this into a function and then use that.  Functions and Procedures aren’t possible yet.. but soon?

It’ll be easy to get the coins and spaces on this but processing will be more fiddly.  Viewing variables is easy so that should help debugging but I think browsing large code will be as difficult as you’d expect from a visual editor.

Interestingly, Scratch is written in Squeak which is an implementation of Smalltalk.  Smalltalk is the forefather of Object Oriented programming languages like C++.  You can download the sourcecode for Scratch but you’ll need Squeak to develop more!