* Processing
* Love2D
* Unity / Godot
* Pygame
In the past, Flash filled this niche, I think (although I never programmed in it). Looking at my own list above, and others' responses, I don't think this niche has truly been filled, alas.
Maybe a startup idea?
And yes, I find the exclamation point annoying.
Good question, I personally think p5.js is a great option. JS is very flexible, and the live environment (at editor.p5js.org) is I suppose very similar to scratch. Drawing elements like squares and circles is as simple as square(), circle(), etc. (with parameters). It's very easy to share an publish (could be on github[1], or just link directly from the editor!). Highly recommended for beginners and any quick interactive work really.
It would be great to have a community page like Scratch though.
[1] See a little procedural tree: https://gustavo-nramires.github.io/ :)
Minecraft and Roblox support mods written in Java and Lua respectively but it's a pretty big leap from Scratch to Minecraft mods.
I was recently discovered a dedicated editor for Minecraft modding (https://bridge-core.app) and that seems pretty cool. A lot more could be done in this space though.
She learned scratch and was told it was "coding". This was a massive lie.
I work at a company that runs coding classes for children.
We created https://woofjs.com/ explicitly for the purpose of transitioning students from Scratch to a text based language. It's not perfect, but worth a look!
We find a lot of schools go straight to python coding after scratch, but our block based system is a powerful and allows students to write their first lines of Javascript inside the blocks themselves - and they can then go all the way to writing full Javascript files inside Construct 3.
There is a big gap here and after speaking to a lot of teachers it's a big problem and we're hoping Construct 3 helps smooth this gap out for both the students and the teachers.
You can paste a link to a Scratch URL into the page and it automatically translates it to equivalent JavaScript that can then be edited in the browser or downloaded and edited locally. It's got an impressive and intuitive library behind it and I think it's fantastic.
For making games, Roblox is perhaps a good choice. You can post a modded example game and get your friends playing it very quickly, then iterate rapidly.
It's a text based programming platform centred around creating games and can be used from a young age and into adulthood.
Sadly, they often move on to real computing. They are taught how to use Word and Excel.
I find this sad, as it means a lot of people who might otherwise benefit from programming in their daily lives never pick it up again. Just as not everyone who can cook needs to be a chef with professional grade equipment to benefit from the activity, not everyone who programs needs to be a software developer with all the incidental complexity that entails.
We start teaching Java to kids as early as 8th/9th grade when the vast majority aren’t ready for it. Even my sophomore students in college regularly struggle with the language.
There’s a huge gap between scratch and Java that is begging to be filled by innovative language design. Or better yet, a language that can a student can stick with from early age all the way through adulthood. Imagine if students who started at 11 actually stuck with it through 18 and beyond, instead of giving up at 13/14. Scratch has a perception problem as being something exclusively for kids; I don’t know how it can shed that reputation.
We need to stop treating early childhood programming education as the first stage of the funnel into corporate tech jobs. Not everyone wants to end up there, and we shouldn’t design their education with that goal in mind. Programming literacy is too important in the 21st century to reserve the skill for would-be devs.