An open source version of the Scratch 2.0 project editor has been made available on GitHub, enabling more people to get involved with this popular bloc-structured programming language suitable for kids.
LLK-Scratch-flash is the basis for the online and offline versions of Scratch 2.0 and its code has been released under the GPL version 2 license.
Scratch 2.0 was released in May 2013 so it has taken a year for its source code to get open sourced. The main improvement of Scratch 2.0, over the earlier version which is already open sourced, is that users can create edit, and view projects directly in a web browser - you no longer have to download or upload projects or install any software.
Scratch, which is an event-driven imperative language influenced by both Smalltalk and Logo was designed by Mitchel Resnick and is developed at MIT Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK) Goup. It has a a large community of users, both individuals and in education and research. You'll find over 5.5 million projects shared on the Scratch website and on May 17 2014, designated Scratch Day, live events took place around the globe.
Now that the Scratch 2.0 editor and player have been open sourced more people can join in the task of identifying bugs and fixing or documenting issues. However, it does seem that the MIT-based Scratch team isn't looking for too much volunteer activity. The README.md notes:
When submitting pull requests please be patient. The Scratch Team is very busy and it can take a while to find time to review the pull requests. Your code may require changes before being accepted or may not be suitable to acceptance. The organization and class structures can't be radically changed without significant coordination and collaboration from the Scratch Team. These types of changes should be avoided since they would impact the official version.
It also notes:
Unfortunately, when migrating the issues to this new repository the existing pull requests and references to other issues have been broken. We will try to clarify comments when necessary and as old issues are closed this will become less of an issue. So just at the moment it is difficult to see which are issues that need attention and which are ones that are already being dealt with.
It's like something from a horror story. One million programmers couldn't get out of Vim once they got into it. The proof? One million hits on a Stack Overflow question.
If you haven't encountered the idea of CodeCity before then this is going to be fun. Even if you have it is worth checking out what some familiar JavaScript code libraries look like as cities.
