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Google Blockly — a Language With a Difference
mikejuk writes "There are aspects of Google that increasingly don't make sense. First they dump App Inventor — a graphical language for Android apps — in a fit of spring cleaning and closures — and now they have launched another Scratch-like graphical language, Blockly. However Blockly is different. It works like Scratch or App inventor but it is written in JavaScript. This means it can be included in any web page or web app very easily. This, in turn, means that it can be used for education, getting people to learn to program, or as an easy-to-use script generator for the app. The FAQ gives the example of automating GMail filters and management. The additional difference is that Blockly can compile its programs to JavaScript, Dart or Python so you can take the script and develop it further. This is a really good idea. As long as Google doesn't throw this one out in a fit of reorganization and spring cleaning, it's a welcome new language."
There are things Google does that don't make sense, such as X and Y. Now they've done Z that makes sense of X and Y. I sure hope they don't do to Z what they did with X and Y!
When you bring a product to market, your users just don't expect it to suddenly go away and be replaced by something else a year down the road.
If you violate this expectation too many times, people will stop paying attention. For this reason, "maintenance mode" is one of the most overlooked -- yet most important -- parts of the product lifecycle.
Look Google, yeah, we get it: you like inventing stuff. Great. But here's the thing -- people want to use the products you've invented. We'd rather have you support your existing products than throw them away and spend a year or two developing a replacement. Yes, there's a cost to doing this. But if you care about the long term, you'll put in the extra effort.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
..."building an app graphically" is to "learning programming" what "using a calculator" is to "learning math." You've replaced an actual understanding of the underlying process with a bunch of buttons to be punched.
It's only still "programming" if you have the knowledge to do it without the tools, but not the time.
Yet Another Google Language.
I've taught quite a few courses ranging from traditional programming to tools such as Adobe Flash (which allows you to use any combination of the graphical tools and ActionScript, the latter being a full-fledged object-oriented programming language, with GC and all the other modern niceties). I've drawn boxes around variables to symbolize how they contain the values, I've given assignments to write pseudo-code, I've demonstrated the concept of algorithms by asking students to give me clear instructions on how to order a stack of documents alphabetically, when I only know how to access them by index and compare two documents... and I'm not sure if any of that has been worth the time.
I don't think I've ever run into a student, who would have been able to actually grasp the concept but would then have stumbled because the code part is difficult. There are people who can grasp the concepts and who then have no real trouble with the code and then there are people who don't really understand having one loop inside another, no matter whether you allow them to write down code, draw flowcharts or whatever.
You're quibbling over symbology, while missing the important distinctions.
At the most trivial level, just about all programming is "graphical". Characters are symbols. A two-dimensional array of symbols is a graphic. You don't think of it as a graphic, but there it is, right there on your display.
If you've got a graphical language that lets you drag colorful boxes around, snap them together, and watch them twinkle contentedly as the program executes, how exactly is that different from using text? If it's "less rich" -- if there are constructs available in a "conventional language" that aren't available in the graphical language -- then we can discuss the graphical language's particular deficits, and perhaps correct them.
Model-Ts were "any color you like, as long as it's black". It was General Motors that started coloring things up and I think they also invented model years. The model year is a not so subtle suggestion that you are driving an "old" car even though it still runs fine.
As people "acquire" technology like search and programming languages, the people who made their scratch creating these things are left with nothing to do. You might think they'd move on to create something entirely different, or that they'd move into maintenance mode as you suggest. However, they have special expertise in creating not maintaining, and moreover they have special exerptise in creating particular kinds of things. The easiest thing for them to do is fool people into believing that thing A is obsolete so they can create thing B which is fundamentally the same. They maximize their profit that way. It's not so much malice as it is simple laziness. It's economics 101, really.
People want recurring revenue. It's the next best thing to economic rent. Or as I like to say, "everybody wants to be a subsidized farmer".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?