A while ago, I wrote a post about how I think that programming is really difficult to get into these days without a ton of effort on the learner’s part due to varying factors such as language complexity and operating system api’s. I then proceeded to discuss a product by MIT Media Labs called Scratch that was designed to teach children programming by addressing these issues. In case you don’t remember, I wasn’t too fond of Scratch.
Last night at the Chicago Ruby Users Group, there was a presentation on Shoes, which is another project in this vein that uses Ruby as its underlying language. Shoes addresses all of the complaints I had with Scratch, and lets you write code instead of relying on a mouse/GUI driven interface. Writing a program in Shoes is very straightforward, and you can do a lot of neat stuff in a very few, simple, straightforward lines of code. I was pretty impressed. This is exactly the type of thing we need in a world that is devoid of QBasic.
Here’s a screenshot of a sample program called follow.rb that draws circles depending on the position of the mouse cursor: (the sourcecode is in the terminal to the right of the demo)
This screenshot doesn’t really do it justice though – because Shoes is built on top of Cairo and Pango, the demo runs very smoothly and doesn’t reek of jittery animation like so many other sandbox programming environs.
While it’s definitely not a finished product ( 1 or 2 of the demos segfaulted on me due to some C code in the Shoes app) – it runs on Windows, OS X AND Linux. I had no problems checking out the source from subversion and building Shoes on my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop. Shoes is a huge step in the right direction with regards to addressing the issue of getting kids into programming by making it less of an impossible task. I look forward to watching this project develop, and really hope that it catches on.