[lfnoise]

My son, 17, learned to program in Scratch, and wrote a lot of games in it. Since then he has learned Python, Lua (in which he wrote a space invaders), and Java in both high school and during the summer at Cornell. He can write in these languages, but the problem is, he thinks in Scratch. He always goes back to write things in Scratch. In Scratch he has written a number of ray tracing and path tracing renderers which can model roughness, specularity, ambient occlusion.. He teaches me stuff about rendering that he reads from papers. Right now he is working on an NES emulator in Scratch that necessarily includes a 6502 emulator. It can load and play Mario games. But I can't get him move his ideas to a textual language.

[sharp11]

That is utterly fascinating. From his pov, is it a problem, or only from yours?

[lfnoise]

I'd like him to make a more firm next step. He sometimes brings up some of the difficulties he has expressing things that would be simple in another language. I point this out. He understands that but still prefers to work in Scratch. One factor may be that he has a social network on Scratch.