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A visual programming language allows you to design a program by dragging and dropping visual components. They haven’t had a whole lot of success in general, but seem to be gaining traction as good tools for teaching programming to children.

A new one being developed at MIT seems to be gaining some traction as a children’s tool: Scratch.

I’ll have to look more carefully at it, but there is a small possibility that they may be inherently an order of magnitude more powerful than other text-based languages. If they are truly easy to learn for small children, then they may in fact be so powerful that the community at large may overlook the capabilities. This wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened. Logo is an example of a ridiculously powerful langauge, which was completely overlooked by many people, professionals and researchers alike.

New ideas or approaches that are fundamentally more powerful than existing ones are oftent dismissed prematurely as being toys and are assumed to be lacking any fundamental improvement in expressive power. Anyway, something to think about, the next time you want to dismiss a language by calling it a toy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.