View source for Pilan Chenhansa's Scratch Journal

First of all, I just wanted to say that learning and implementing Scratch took a lot longer than I thought it would.  Especially being a former computer scientist (a long time ago, or at least it feels like it), it wasnât as easy as I thought it would be, especially for a âbeginnerâ language.  Also, it wasnât easy to even think of a game to try to make!!! 

It took me quite awhile to get used to the fact that not all of things in the program move simultaneously.  Even though this resembled an object-oriented sort of programming language, I had to eventually figure out that time delays were necessary in the program to make everything work correctly.  On a similar note, I also had a hard time trying to debug my program.  I was used to having âprintscrnâ and other similar debugging instructions out there, and it was not until many hours into the program that I realized that I could just drag the variables onto the stage to check their status.  

One thing that I still donât know how to do is to have the program initialize (upon opening) to a certain setup.  In regular programming, the slate starts off clean until you start adding things to it, but it seemed like the sprites would always show up on the opening screen until I pressed the Green Flag to hide them.  In other words, I wish there was a way to initialize the sprites as hidden â there may be a way, but I just couldnât figure it out.  With my game being a match game, it is important for the animals to start off hidden, or else the game is not as effective.  

Overall though, I felt like this was a good beginner language, especially because of the ease of use of forever loops, recursive loops, if-else statements, and nested conditionals.  When I first started programming, those things took a lot of work, especially having to create numerous âcounterâ variables, but this program definitely makes that easier.  The availability of all the costumes and stages also gave users many more options, as compared to other, more-complicated programming languages.  I know that, now that Iâm more used to it, experimenting in Scratch will be a lot more easier and a lot more fun.

* extremely fine, fun, well done. how would you explain what you mean by "recursive loops"?