[WillAdams]

>Our industries shunning of interface builders has done more to make it difficult to get kids programming than I think we admit.

I'd be very glad of an agreed-upon IDE which:

- made it easy to draw up a UI

- was cross-platform

- opensource

- easy to install/compile/distribute compiled programs

Bonus points if it is also uses standard widgets and is accessible to screen readers and the like.

Livecode (Hypercard clone previously known as Runtime Revolution) was sort of that until the community edition was pulled.

[taeric]

Fully agreed. I'd be happy with a stable API that lets me treat a window as an array of pixels.

I'll put another plug in for scratch, if you are ok with any of the limitations it has.

I seem to recall there were more options installed on a default Raspberry Pi than I expected. I think many of them fail the open source criteria? It even has a student edition of Mathematica, which is quite impressive for what it does.

[WillAdams]

Not really easy to make a traditional application/program and distribute it stand-alone from Scratch.

I'd love to see a Lisp compiler w/ GUI toolkit which would just compile to a stand-alone .exe or .app or .apk or even .html file w/ matching JavaScript library.

[taeric]

I think distributing a stand-alone application is beyond most any beginner level needs. They want to share, sure; but with a much more limited audience.

Not that I wouldn't love the same, mind you. I think a lot of toolkits and compilers make the mistake of trying to be universally distributable. Regardless of how much effort that happens to be.