To be fair though, I would have liked this as a child. In fact I had some "create your own games" program that worked a bit like this. When I was 10 I really liked playing around with the Logo.
Can someone explain to me what the point of all these new visual programming things is?
Kevin Lopez
Michael Myers
*with Logo.
Playing "with the logo" is what a Holla Forums larper does.
Jack Gomez
Have any of you actually used it? I used one as part of a paid study in Uni during my first year. Everyone in the study was in Programming 1 and had already completed a couple projects and several labs, yet almost nobody could complete a simple fucking input-output loop in the lego GUI (I was the only one who finished, but I was also the most experienced). The problem is that the GUI is so rigid that you can't even get your ideas down onto the screen. You also don't have a way to quickly select a function if you already know what you want. So if you know you want the print function, you still have to scroll through a sloppy toolbox to go get it instead of just typing it in.
tl;dr, Lego coding actually makes coding HARDER TO LEARN for EVERYONE. If you're worried that it'll encourage more people to enter the industry, worry no more. Lego coding is certain to SCARE PEOPLE AWAY. Languages like Python or Ruby are far more of a threat to your elite ivory tower than this shit is.
John Price
Oh yeah, and one more thing. These lego GUIs don't even really add more abstraction than a language like Python. They just replace the normal function names with more "English sounding" phrases and words, and make refactoring a bitch.
Jackson Cook
That is solved very easily by adding search box to GUI.
Ian Davis
Just to be clear, I was talking about LOGO, some younger people here might not know what that was.
en.wikipedia.org
Isaiah Cruz
Your problem was that you had ideas of your own. Those restriction and the lack of abstractions are part of what makes these environments easier to use for women and IQ 85 people. Those people don't think (they can't) they just follow instructions and change a value here and there.
Mason Cox
I've tried using scratch, it's needlessly hard, nothing is where it should be and everything is too loose to be useful for a beginner. Game Maker's drag and drop was pretty good, it shows you exactly where your stuff needs to go, doesn't give you too many hints off the bat (so your brain actually has to work a bit) and you could mix in drag and drop blocks and code (including putting code in drag and drop blocks) so the change from visual to real code is waaaaay smoother.
Logan Bell
We used that on Apple //e computers in first and second grade. Good times.
Lincoln Nelson
are you implying women are (sub) IQ 85?