I’m considering building a visual programming language, akin to Scratch, for use by children (a.k.a. poor typists) in programming micro-controllers or robots.
There is, for example, a project to build a graphical programming environment for the Arduino.
I really like Scratch, and would like the graphical coding to be similar. Scratches source is available under its own free license. It is written in Squeak (based on Smalltalk), and I don’t know the language.
It occurs to me there might be other projects to build off of. When I looked through Wikipedia’s list of graphical languages, I didn’t see much that was open source and could be built off of.
I am familiar with C/C++, Python, and a little bit of Objective C. If I were to build my own project from scratch, I think I would use the Qt library, as I would want to build something cross-platform, but unfortunately, I don’t know it either.
If I had an infinite amount of time to work on it, you can bet I’d learn Squeak and Qt and do an exhaustive search of all existing visual programming projects. That not being the case, I’m asking for opinions:
- Is there an existing project that I should consider working from?
- Would you recommend learning Squeak, or Qt, or something else?
If you are familiar with C/C++ then its worth learning QT. It should be easy for you to pick up and get going in no time. There are also plenty of examples that come with the package to get you started once you install it. From there you will be able to evaluate how best it can work for you.