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by maweki 1172 days ago
I love alternative models of computation and the EV3 mindstorms language was very nice with a type system (including coercion rules) encoded in puzzle shapes, dataflow through "pipes", parallelism through diverging code paths.

With the scratch language I'm not so sure. I feel it's just imperative programming where you can't make a syntax error. You can put strings where numbers go and the semantics is unclear. Parallelism only works through events. Does the IDE provide so much more than Greenfoot and the like do not?

1 comments

Parallelism only works through events

why is that a problem?

In terms of the EV3 language you could spin up Lego motors in parallel just by drawing two lines from the previous command instead of a single line. Threading in a very literal sense.

Scratch being event-driven is not bad in itself. But there is so much design space to be explored.