When comparing Scratch vs pygame, the Slant community recommends pygame for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” pygame is ranked 10th while Scratch is ranked 57th. The most important reason people chose pygame is:
Pygame uses Python as its scripting language. Python is widely considered one of the easiest languages to grasp even for beginners.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Visual
Code is represented as visual building blocks that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.
Pro Easy to learn
Scratch is designed to teach computational thinking rather than focus on specific syntax. It was designed specifically to be easy to learn for anyone over the age of 8.
Pro Great starting point for kids
Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.
Pro No need to be able to type
Pro Can be used to create games
Pro Highly structured
The language is highly structured. Therefore, it gives you the essentials of how to think like a programmer and teaches you good programming practices from early on, so you could write clean, working and readable code in the future.
Pro Easy Python syntax
Pygame uses Python as its scripting language. Python is widely considered one of the easiest languages to grasp even for beginners.
Pro Very easy to understand
The API is very straightforward.
Pro Good canvas system
Pygame has a drawing system that allows the user to create and draw on an unlimited number of canvases.
Cons
Con Won't get you a job
Scratch is not a language used in the workplace. Instead it teaches computational thinking, helping to create a foundation to aid in learning other languages.
Con Does not teach you programming
Learning Scratch might help you if you have high difficulty with logical thinking. However, starting with a proper programming language, especially an easy one, will give you the benefits of starting with something like Scratch and everything else.
Con Very basic
Pretty much just a wrapper for SDL.
Con Deathly slow
Con Nonexistent community
No good forums, wiki, or other ways to reach other Pygame developers.
Con Messy documentation
The docs are messy, and some basic functions are infuriating to work out. There's even some places in the documentation where it's clearly wrong about how a method is called/what the arguments really do.
Con Hasn't been updated in years
Hasn't been updated in years.
Con Outdated
Pygame uses a really old version of SDL and is missing some of the features developed for SDL2.
Con Pygame is a language, not a game engine
Physics, AI, networking, and input are not supported.