Google has released a completely visual programming language that lets you build software without typing a single character.
Now available on Google Code -- the company's site for hosting open source software -- the new language is called Google Blockly, and it's reminiscent of Scratch, a platform developed at MIT that seeks to turn even young children into programmers.
Like Scratch, Blockly lets you build applications by piecing together small graphical objects in much the same way you'd piece together Legos. Each visual object is also a code object -- a variable or a counter or an "if-then" statement or the like -- and as you piece them to together, you create simple functions. And as you piece the functions together, you create entire applications -- say, a game where you guide a tiny figurine through a maze.
"Users can drag blocks together to build an application," reads the description on Google's site. "No typing required."
The project is part of a much larger effort to bring programming skills to, well, everyone. In the summer of 2010, Google announced a similar platform known as App Inventor, and this year, an outfit called Codecademy has made headlines as it seeks educate a whole new world of programmers over the web. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is among those using the service -- or at least that's what he says.
"Programming has followed a steady progression of becoming more and more accessible," says Neil Fraser, one of the Googlers behind Blocky. "From Assembly, to Fortran, to C++, to Python, to Blockly, each generation gets to use an even higher-level interface. Eventually one will be able to instruct computers with completely natural language. At which point everyone will be able to tell a computer what to do."
Fraser says that Blocky is designed to replace the "blocks editor" previously used by App Inventor and that unlike Scratch, it's intended for more than just children. "Blockly is designed to be embedable into any program or website which wants to enable novice programmers to write scripts," he says. "One of the goals for Blockly is to generate readable code -- whether it be JavaScript, Dart, Python, or some other language -- which the user can continue working with once they out-grow the blocks editor. We want users to be able to take their data and leave, whenever they want."
App Inventor was the brainchild of the MIT computer science and engineering professor Hal Abelson, who was on sabbatical at Google at the time. The platform was actually an outgrowth of Scratch, which Abelson had worked on at MIT. It was billed as a tool that would allow even the greenest of techies to build applications for the company's Android mobile operating system, but its life at Google was short. When Abelson returned to MIT the following summer, he essentially took the platform with him.
At the University of California at Berkeley, researchers are offering their own port of Scratch, known as Snap.
With the Google name behind it, Blocky has already sparked at least a temporary flurry of interest. At Hacker News -- the online hangout for Silicon Valley developers -- a post about the platform has received over 100 comments over the past day, and some include programs built with the platform.
From Google's site, you can translate Blockly applications into existing languages, including Javascript; Dart, Google new take on Javascript, and Python. And there's a "Hebrew and Arabic" programming mode where you piece together the objects from right to left, rather than left to right.
So, Google Blocky is a little like a Pixar movie. It's for kids. But it's also for adults. And it had a nice sense of humor.
Update: This story had been updated with comment from Google's Neil Fraser.
