I disagree fairly fundamentally with this, I've been a club teacher in primary schools, and scratch is such a good teaching tool for kids that to this day I marvel at it.<p>I want to evaluate lamdatalk against scratch on the principals on which scratch was built, low floor, high ceiling, wide walls:<p>Low Floor:
I can show a child the program "when space key pressed, Move 10 steps" they'll need to be able to read, and they'll need to know what the "space key" is (they've been weaned on touch screens remember), and then they'll understand it. further, they can then hit the space key and immediately see state change. They can use scratch on any computer they have access to at home from a browser.<p>Lambdatalk will also require them to know how to read, and I'll need to explain what "lambda" means to a young child, and probably how to pronounce it. I'll need to say what the arguments to a function are, and what "argument" means, and what way round they should go. I'll need to explain to them why they should care, a moving character is immediately interesting to a child, this lambda has limited use to them. if they want to type it out I'll need to show them how to type a curly bracket. They'll need to download and run a program to use lambdatalk, on a PC they probably don't own. (or use this inscrutable sandbox I guess? <a href="http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=sandbox" rel="nofollow">http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=sandbox</a>)<p>High ceiling:
There's a lot you can do in scratch, people regularly post rudimentary raytracers or highly polished games on the scratch website. That said it has some limitations. It doesn't interact with the web at large, it's slow & hard to do work in 3d, and impossible to match the likes of a real game engine, kids tend to want to graduate upwards after a while.<p>I was expecting to find http libraries or some impressive demos for high end lambdatalk, but I can't see them, it may be more performant, but I can't actually see the same level of demoscene work as exists in scratch. I wasn't expecting to but I've got to give this one too, to scratch<p>Wide walls:
Kids make games, animations, toys, mocked-up os'es, sounds, and conversation bots in scratch, there's a lot to do with it<p>Lambdatalk just, doesn't have so much? if a kid says they want to make something in scratch they often can, unless it's 3d or requires wider internet access, lamdbatalk doesn't seem to provide so much.<p>In conclusion, don't rag on scratch for clicks, it's an educators miracle, and when kids want to "graduate" up to more, they're looking for more possibilities, not harder challenges, like html, or python libraries that let them interact with the web, or 3d engines that let them make the kinds of games they like to play. As an adult I think lambdatalk seems like a cool toy, and I'll put some time into playing with it.<p>kids want to make the kinds of things they like to use.