[Yr7-10it] scratch programming

[victor rajewski]

On 9/13/07, Kent Beveridge <kbeveridge at stbc.vic.edu.au> wrote:
> GOOD QUESTION Rob.
> I am just going on the premise of the selection of languages available on the website and in the study design. Given these languages and the requirements for the U3 OC1 I am not certain that 'Scratch' is a suitable language for the 'puritans' among us.
> Personally, given that the uni's basically will teach what they want of their students at first year etc, Scratch would at least give first time programmers a 'taste' of what is to come.
> It DOES allow users to create a variable etc but some might argue that it is not a REAL programming language.

As far as I can tell, Scratch is a complete language. Maybe not quite
Turing complete due to lack of infinite tape (if the canvas were to be
made infinte it would be Turing complete). But complete. And it is a
pure object oriented language, complete with indepedent threads and
messaging. The main holes I see is that you can't instantiate an
object during runtime, and the notion of the method is tied to an
action (that is it's not particularly modular). I would argue that it
is much more a real programming language than VB up to version 4.

vik