When comparing Lightbot vs Scratch, the Slant community recommends Scratch for most people. In the question“What are the best books or programs for teaching kids to code?” Scratch is ranked 1st while Lightbot is ranked 5th. 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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Works multi-platform
Runs on iOS, Android and Windows.
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
Cons
Con Windows requires flash
Flash should probably not be installed on your system if you enjoy a safe, virus-free system. Though the Chrome browser uses their own Flash fork which is safe to use being that the browser is constantly updated for security.
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.