[JamesSwift]

(Not OP) Scratch is great. Its an excellent first step. But you hit the limits fairly quickly for what is easy to do "reasonably". So you stay within the limits of what it does well and that limits the kinds of things you can do. And then you risk losing the kids interest to keep at it, if they become bored with the medium.

I think Roblox is not a bad next step (tons of out of the box marketplace options), or Ive also been doing a bit of Godot with my kids but with me driving a lot of it while we explore it together.

[ninetyninenine]

Why not extend the language itself to have the features we want? Why turn it into text?

[Retr0id]

Making non-trivial things work in Scratch can be fun for similar reasons that it's fun to develop games for the NES in 2025, using modern tooling [0].

NES development would be easier if you upgraded the hardware to be more capable, but that would defeat the purpose. It could still be an interesting project in its own right, but it's not "solving" the same problem.

With Scratch, there are also fundamental practical limitations. Dragging stuff around with a mouse becomes a chore, once your code passes a modest size. Maybe you could invent a system of keyboard shortcuts, but that sounds even harder to use.

We already have mountains of excellent tools for working with text, from IDEs to git forges. It'd be really hard to build something competitive, for scratch blocks, from scratch.

[0] https://github.com/llvm-mos/llvm-mos-sdk

[ninetyninenine]

Agreed.

Existing tooling is literally the only reason why.

But there is nothing inherently better about text.

[JamesSwift]

Have you used Scratch before?

Its just inherent to the environment and use case I think. They are very focused on their mission of being a very quick to start platform for children learning to program in a visual language. They do a good job. There isnt a great solution for "whats next", and this (goboscript) could be that.