Post 1- Coding in Scratch

My Scratch program I wrote for the assignment. It was something cute I made for my girlfriend; there's a few inside jokes we have about me being a wizard, and I used some of her favorite animals. Basically, I was trying to impress her with my sweet coding skills:

 Working in Scratch was an interesting experience. For work and in classes I have written code in a variety of languages like Java, Visual Basic, and C++. But this was the first time the code wasn’t exactly being written, but modularly put together. Because of past experience I think it was pretty easy to pick up, but if this was my first assignment it might have taken longer. It seems like Scratch is designed for younger people without coding experience to be able to learn foundational skills. For instance, the format of the Scratch language forces you to break up your “modules” between character, background, and actions. Not doing coding modularly is something a lot of self taught (and poorly taught) coders do, and it’s something I’ve had to correct in other peoples codes at work. Instead of neat modules, the author will have crammed everything into one big wall-of-text module. So Scratch forces you to modularize and shows the relationships between actions that go tighter. Personally I’d rather code in a more “traditional” language, because I have more control over the finished version. Once you learn the basics you can usually transition the knowledge to another language fairly quickly. However for beginners or youth, something like Python could be overwhelming and getting started in these systems. Also, while there are some advanced features like “If/” but the language is still fairly limited in terms of things we want to change. Most modern languages have libraries on libraries of things you can do. The biggest difficulty was just trying to find all the different directions and working with the limitations of the software. In a real life variable, I would do this as well; coding at work requires many tries and lots of debugging, going row by row looking for the error. Many programs will highlight your errors, while some just stop compiling.