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Add to SafariWhen comparing Scratch vs J, the Slant community recommends Scratch for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Scratch is ranked 18th while J is ranked 47th. The most important reason people chose Scratch is:
Code is represented as [visual building blocks](http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-use-Scratch/) that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.
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 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 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 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 No need to be able to type
Pro Can be used to create games
Pro Every function is an operator
3 classes of operators (verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions) with verbs the most basic function that take either 1 or 2 (infix) parameters. Operators allow function composition with a minimum of parentheses.
Pro Simpler Imperative language constructs as failback to functional programming
J also supports multiline functional definitions similar to BASIC/Pascal. Including error handling.
Pro Compiled language speed from interpreted language.
Each built in operator is a C/asm function, and special code further optimizes some operator combinations. Result is optimized C speed from quick parsing. Array orientation parses and compiles a function once, and applies it to all array items.
Pro 25 year old language, with core unchanged in last 10 years
Still actively developed, but most recent changes have been in libraries and IDE and platform support.
Language is considered "perfected"... though not quite.
Pro Language reference has simple one page index
Complete core programming functional tools allow writting programs and libraries without imports.
Pro No operator precedence rules
(... within each of the 3 operator classes) makes reading code easier. Very simple parsing rules.
Cons
Con For kids
For kids.
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 Strange OOP
Scratch has a very strange implementation of OOP that is sprite based, and will become very confusing when you move to other languages.
Con Weird
It's straight up weird.
Con Syntax is pure madness
quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#)
