Scratch is developed by MIT, so they have funding that comes from alumni who have profittable careers in technology and get a nice tax write off for throwing money back at their school.
Scratch is stupid simple and can be learned by a six year old, all by themselves with no help from an adult: Open up someone else's project, look at the
blocks notpage after page of code, modify the blocks with drag and drop and fudging one or two words or numbers, save to your own account as and publish it as a remix, show mom and dad "Look what I made", get responses from other Scratch users, easy peasy.
Scratch has possibley hundreds of thousands of users with all their materials available online for the next six year old to marvel at and learn from.
Scratch is used by universities to teach the very basics of programming to young adults before moving on to
other languages.
Every semester of
CS50 introduces programming to over 800 in class students and thousands of online students via Scratch.
To do what Scratch does livcode would have to:
A) Be adopted by a unviversity as their pet project
B) be distributed FREELY by that university
C) offer a web based IDE that runs instantly
E) have a course work that follows the same 'learn the very basics of programming
other languages with livecode" that Scratch has, abandoning Scratch at some point is a built in accepted paradigm
D) offer free online computer software development classes that use Livecode the way Harvard.edu does.
Since Runrev is a for profit company who has to have an income to feed it's employees instead of relying on college students to make advances/support the software to get a degree that
they are paying hundreds of thousand of dollars for, and requires people to stick with the product for a prolonged period to increase the knolwege pool and community support around the product, the Scratch success can not be gained simply by throwing around free classes to teachers who will just tadopt an easier to learn more embedded and supported free solution. A free seminar will simply come across as a sales pitch.
Berkeley has
SNAP, used to be BYOB (Build your own blocks) is a more 'grown up' version of Scratch, it's been around at least a decade and has MUCH less of a following/adoption, basically it's only used by Berkeley students who are required to use it to get a grade in one class before moving on to other languages in another class. Unity has BOLT visual programming, Unreal Engine has .., visual tools that turn into C++. Both products are free.300 to 500 new games a month are released to Steam.
I follow
a link from the livecode website and I get:
(Mar 12, 2020) TMHO, there is no progress with LC's HTML5 platform ("web apps") since a long time. So I stopped making new HTML5 standalones.
One person did all that work and it's closed source, nobody can gain from the knowledge it took to develop those abandoned projects, at the same time tens of thousands of kids learned Scratch from some other kids project, and Scratch is still going strong, gaining new users.
In near conclusion, in order to repeat or even attempt to mimic the success of Scratch the entirety of the Scratch model has to be copied:
1. free
2. instant web access
3. open projects
4. drag and drop programming
5. univeristy adoption
6. univeristy distribution
7. community
8. child friendly interface
9. training to learn other languages has to be a core principle
Did I miss anything?
Btw, the source code for
TOSH is available on
github it converts Scratch projects to text, at least before Scratch 3.0. I often think ,what if I could parse the scratch blocks/text into Livecode and generate something more advanced from that simple Scratch project outline...but then I realize Livecode costs hundreds of dollars and the Scratch to Livecode market for a process like that is stillborn. The source code to
Scratch is avialable online, so in theory a Scratch interface that outputs Livecode UIs and code is totally doable. I can see a "If you already know Scratch, then you know Livecode" selling point, if the pricing was reasonble, and of course if the features/performance matched alternative
free solutions.