Snap

st-class types, and can take anything as parameters, including lists and blocks. - Blocks that can create and return other blocks, thereby enabling functional programming - All the standard list-handling primitives you would expect, like `filter` and `map` All of which was missing from Scratch when I looked at it six months ago. Scratch is a toy language, with a deliberate ceiling that you can't get past because of the language's design. Snap! is a real programming language with no ceiling, with the visual appearance of a toy. It takes longer to do anything in Snap! than in a professional language like Lisp or C# or Go or ... well, all of them, because dragging blocks together is a lot slower than typing. But you can do anything you need to in Snap!. There is no artificial limit that blocks you from going farther, the way Scratch has. P.S. Saying that Scratch is artificially limited is not meant as a dig against the language. It's a deliberate design choice, and it's a fine choice if your intent is to teach people the very basics and then graduate them to another language. It's a choice I disagree with, because I prefer the way Snap! has implemented the same pedagogical choice (you can create tutorials with a limited set of blocks, to avoid presenting complete beginners with an overwhelming array of choices). But it's a defensible choice in many cases (many kids taking a programming class will not have the aptitude — and those who do turn out to have the knack for it can be graduated to Snap! really easily and not have to relearn everything).

IoT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_P7MoBG250 ML/AI and digital fabrication (Ken Kahn's eCraft2Learn): https://project.ecraft2learn.eu/ The "what's this? how do I make a thing like this?" curiosity you describe is exactly how a lot of people get pulled in -- making something move, blink, sing, or stitch on a machine they can see, rather than learning abstract syntax first. Blocks are the on-ramp; the project is the motivation. Different audience than yours, maybe. But "just a toy walled off from reality" undersells what this community has been doing for decades. Snap! also teaches real computer science at college level while staying accessible to kids -- not a stripped-down kiddie language. Brian Harvey: "Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch" (though he notes the original intent was closer to Logo disguised as Scratch): https://forum.snap.berkeley.edu/t/hygienic-macros/3258/6 Re alanbernstein's point about keyboard vs GUI: Snap! is not keyboard-hostile. It has a keyboard editor for scripts -- build and edit whole scripts without the mouse, block search from the keyboard, infix arithmetic expressions typed left-to-right. Manual chapter: https://docs.snap.berkeley.edu/user-interface-elements/#sec-... Demo (typing formulas from the keyboard): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU Full IDE accessibility (screen readers etc.) is still a work in progress; Jens and Brian document what's there now: https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap/issues/1498

https://handbook.selflanguage.org/2017.1/morphic.html The Squeak port is single-inheritance Smalltalk classes -- closer to what most people mean by "OOP UI toolkit." Etoys is Morphic. Full Squeak Morphic in a browser, no install: https://try.squeak.org/ Squeak 6.1 release notes (Objectland, tree morph overhaul): https://squeak.org/release_notes/6.1/ In JavaScript there are two Morphic implementations people often conflate. Same family, not the same code. Dan Ingalls's Lively Kernel / Lively Web (~2008, Sun) is the full live system: modular core/lively/morphic/ (Halos, Serialization, Scrubbing, Connectors, constraints), plus IDE, parts bin, world persistence. JSConf 2012 demo: https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel/tree/master/cor... http://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc Jens Monig's morphic.js (~2010, BYOB4/Snap!) is a separate codebase: single-file Canvas kernel (~13k lines), World/Hand/stepping/dirty rects, template peel-off, ScrollFrame inertial pan. Jens names Ingalls's LK as the gold standard but says it is not a direct port -- though fullCopy() was ported almost literally from Squeak, comments included. Snap bundled it from day one (2013-03-16). Standalone extract: https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap/blob/master/src/morphic.js https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap/blob/master/docs/morphic.txt https://github.com/jmoenig/morphic.js https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphic_(software) On multiple inheritance: neither JS port uses it, and Self Morphic didn't really either. LK cheats with an explicit Trait composition layer (Object.subclass plus Trait(...) mixins). Snap cheats with Squeak-style copying (fullCopy, isTemplate peel-off). The live feel comes from copyable morph trees and shared behavior, not MI. If you want one more readable architecture tour beyond sin-ack's intro, the Self handbook chapter 7 is still the root document; everything else is commentary on it.

https://handbook.selflanguage.org/2017.1/morphic.html The Squeak port is single-inheritance Smalltalk classes -- closer to what most people mean by "OOP UI toolkit." Etoys is Morphic. Full Squeak Morphic in a browser, no install: https://try.squeak.org/ Squeak 6.1 release notes (Objectland, tree morph overhaul): https://squeak.org/release_notes/6.1/ In JavaScript there are two Morphic implementations people often conflate. Same family, not the same code. Dan Ingalls's Lively Kernel / Lively Web (~2008, Sun) is the full live system: modular core/lively/morphic/ (Halos, Serialization, Scrubbing, Connectors, constraints), plus IDE, parts bin, world persistence. JSConf 2012 demo: https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel/tree/master/cor... http://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc Jens Monig's morphic.js (~2010, BYOB4/Snap!) is a separate codebase: single-file Canvas kernel (~13k lines), World/Hand/stepping/dirty rects, template peel-off, ScrollFrame inertial pan. Jens names Ingalls's LK as the gold standard but says it is not a direct port -- though fullCopy() was ported almost literally from Squeak, comments included. Snap bundled it from day one (2013-03-16). Standalone extract: https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap/blob/master/src/morphic.js https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap/blob/master/docs/morphic.txt https://github.com/jmoenig/morphic.js https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphic_(software) On multiple inheritance: neither JS port uses it, and Self Morphic didn't really either. LK cheats with an explicit Trait composition layer (Object.subclass plus Trait(...) mixins). Snap cheats with Squeak-style copying (fullCopy, isTemplate peel-off). The live feel comes from copyable morph trees and shared behavior, not MI. If you want one more readable architecture tour beyond sin-ack's intro, the Self handbook chapter 7 is still the root document; everything else is commentary on it.