[TheAsprngHacker]

Agreed, and Scratch is hardly the pinnacle of programming language theory.

I was talking to professor Shriram Krishnamurthi a week ago about a block-based, educational ML dialect I was making, and he told me that he believed that once a language had a type system as sophisticated as mine, its target audience should be using text, not blocks. So, perhaps Scratch-style languages are a dead-end, or infeasible beyond a certain level.

My personal hope for the "next level" of programming languages is those that use typed holes to interactively help the programmer construct the program.

[lonelappde]

Why do you think a block based language would be good for learning ML?

My impression is that blocks would be good for learning concepts without accidentally overfitting on syntax, but for writing real programs, blocks are hopelessly inefficient for input and editing. Then again, letting the user input text but automatically convert to blocks by continual parsing, might be the best of both worlds. Sort of like emacs lisp parens mode.