When I used Scratch 1.4, I don't recall the UI being too bad, and it ran pretty fast: Smalltalk is pretty good at that. But I'm generally pretty good at picking up these sorts of things, and my computer wasn't particularly slow.
If you want a Real Language presented the same way, Snap! (descended from BYOB) is essentially a Scheme in Scratch's clothing.
But the two real draws of Scratch were its hackability and its community. Back before Scratch 2.0 ruined everything, Scratch was written in Smalltalk, and using a widely-known hidden feature, you could examine the source code and make whatever changes you wanted with relative ease, resulting in a healthy community of mods and derivatives which explored new features and ideas, or those that the official team had dropped by the wayside (like Mesh, a fully-featured networking system).
Scratch's community was likewise excellent: I spent a lot of time lurking in the Scratch Advanced Topics forum - a sort of off-topic general programming section, where people far smarter than I discussed modifying Scratch, improving the website, and whatever programming projects they happened to be working on (usually web programming in PHP - it was the mid 2000s, after all).
Ah, I encountered Scatch 2.0. I'll definitely check 1.4 out, it looks a lot more accessible and reasonable. I would have loved to have encountered something like this at 14 or 15.
I suspect the reason Scratch felt slow to me is that 2.0 is some kind of HTML5 and/or Flash mess now - you're right, Smalltalk is really fast. I spun up Squeak to check something on this T43 yesterday, and everything was really snappy. I have no reason to expect Scratch will be any slower.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable bit of the exploration everyone did was motivated by the fact that they were "hacking" the platform :P
There seems to be a sad lack of excellent online communities nowadays; I've long looked for sites to complement HN, but without success.
I just had a look at Snap! which is interesting. It definitely flatlines this laptop though, I had to try it on a faster machine. But I'm running the tree animation demo right now, and it looks awesome....
>Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable bit of the exploration everyone did was motivated by the fact that they were "hacking" the platform :P
Nor would I. Even at the age of 8, before I was really able to understand the code, there was a thrill to it, in a cracking-open-the-toy kind of way.
And it helps that Smalltalk does exploration better than just about any other language/environment. You can just open up any Smalltalk app and extend/take it apart using the same tools the developers did to build it.
>There seems to be a sad lack of excellent online communities nowadays; I've long looked for sites to complement HN, but without success.
Lainchan (a sort-of cyberpunk/whatever chan) is quite popular with some of the people who are here on HN. It's a very different atmosphere, but it does emphasize actual good discussion. And it's got a containment board for politics, which always helps.
At the very least, their magazine (https://lainzine.neocities.org) is worth looking at, if not for the generally interesting articles, than for the outright strangeness of a lot of it.
Wow, nice! At 8 (1999) I was given a probably-6-or-7-year-old 286 running DOS 3.3 with nothing on it. That got swapped for an XT a couple years later, which I discovered Qbasic on and got tangled up in for way too many years :S. Smalltalk would have been awesome to discover at that age, moreso a toy with sekret doors and passages in it for me to discover :D
I was recommended Lainchain a couple months ago, actually, but nobody mentioned the magazine, which is really cool. I am not impressed that the ASCII art generation paper in Vol.1 has any associated source code!! The rest of the magazine content and design is really interesting too.
If you want a Real Language presented the same way, Snap! (descended from BYOB) is essentially a Scheme in Scratch's clothing.
But the two real draws of Scratch were its hackability and its community. Back before Scratch 2.0 ruined everything, Scratch was written in Smalltalk, and using a widely-known hidden feature, you could examine the source code and make whatever changes you wanted with relative ease, resulting in a healthy community of mods and derivatives which explored new features and ideas, or those that the official team had dropped by the wayside (like Mesh, a fully-featured networking system).
Scratch's community was likewise excellent: I spent a lot of time lurking in the Scratch Advanced Topics forum - a sort of off-topic general programming section, where people far smarter than I discussed modifying Scratch, improving the website, and whatever programming projects they happened to be working on (usually web programming in PHP - it was the mid 2000s, after all).
But that's enough nostalgia for one day...