Do blocks equal “making” and text equal “coding”? Doing MediaComp in Blocks-Based Languages

Interesting perspective from a blogger in the Scratch community, liked below.  I do frequently hear the pattern described in the post quoted below.  “I’ve started by daughter/niece/local-school on Scratch, and now I want to know how to move them into something ‘real’ (e.g., text).”  I typically point them to amazing things that can be done in Scratch (like Alex Ruthmann’s beautiful livecoding of music in Scratch).

I recently got a chance to play with GP, a new programming language from John Maloney (of Scratch fame), where all blocks and texts are isomorphic.  There’s a slider that lets you switch from one to the other.  Even the debugger and class browser show up with tiles.  Where does that play out in this debate?  GP is the first blocks-based language I’ve used with the right primitives to do MediaComp, so I built one of my examples in it.  Took me about three times as much time to write and four times as much space (in screen real estate) as in Python (even with John looking over my shoulder guiding me).  Maybe that’s not a bad thing — maybe that encourages a different style of use.  Next time I try something like that, I’m far more likely to think about building my own blocks and using more abstraction to save on dragging-and-fitting effort.

I’ve been a part of the Scratch community for about 8 years now (yes, really). During this time, I’ve noticed a pattern that seems to apply to a lot of people:

join Scratch => create projects => discover text-based programming => quit Scratch because of “real programming”

Note the scare quotes around “real programming”. Generally, a “real” programming language is text-based (C, Python, etc.) and apparently qualifies as real because it’s used by well-known developers for something.

Obviously I disagree with disqualifying Scratch as a real programming language.

via Making vs Coding | byte.