Just curious, why not use Pygame?
Scratch abstracts away a ton of stuff to allow the student to focus on logical building blocks that mirror the mental model one might have when writing a real program. I'm wondering if keeping a lot of those abstractions when transitioning to text programming is educationally useful?
For example, it might not be clear that @on_forever is really just a loop, etc. One thing I've noticed when teaching beginners is that when you introduce a library/framework at the same time as a language, they start to form a model of the language that often wrongly includes parts of the library.
This is why I think Pygame is so useful for education, it sits at just the right level of abstraction for learning. In Pygame, your game loop is just a loop, handling input is just conditions in your loop, etc.
Regarding rewriting the AST to avoid async/await, do you have some experience or evidence to suggest that these should be abstracted out? I can see an argument for both sides, so just wondering how exactly you arrived at that decision.
Also, I tried a program with an infinite loop and the UI became unresponsive and I had to close the page. This indicates to me it's running on the main browser thread. Kids (and sometimes senior engineers) write infinite loops occasionally, so I highly recommend executing the user's code in a worker to prevent the harsh experience of losing your work suddenly.
I use Opus 4.6 all day long and this is not my experience at all. Maybe if you're writing standard CRUD apps or other projects well-represented in the training data. Anyone who has written "real" software knows that it's lots of iterating, ambiguity and shifting/opposing requirements.
The article seems to be written in order to feed into some combination of hype/anxiety. If the author wants to make a more compelling case for their stance I would suggest they build and deploy some of this software they're supposedly getting the LLM to perfectly create.
Yes, it's a very useful tool, but these sort of technically-light puff pieces are pretty tiresome and reflect poorly on the people who author and promote them. Also, didn't this guy previously make up some benchmarks that turned out to be bogus? https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1fd75nm/out_of_...