What does HackerNews think of blockly?
The web-based visual programming editor.
I don't really care for these edutech companies that camp on other people's open source technology without even acknowledging it. If you didn't know better you'd think the guy behind this was a genius who invented the whole thing himself, because that's how it's marketed: https://www.patreon.com/edublocks
Blockly is also popular in internet-of-things development with packages like UIFlow, since the block interface is so simple and intuitive that it's kind of self-documenting for peripheral components. It's also easy to extend with your own modules if you're so inclined. It's handy to have as a palette of common functions in a hardware stack without having to track dependencies or maintain a toolchain, making it more accessible for schoolchildren and hobbyists.
Of course the blocks and color coding quickly become unwieldy and hard to read, and the endless clicking becomes tedious. Other irritants are that it defaults to saving only the xml block files, so if you switch over to the code window it's easy to make changes, save them, and not realize that they'll get reverted as soon as you leave the Python window.
I think it was developed (see edit) as a university project. Quite good for teaching the necessary concepts and enabling kids to build their first simple apps within an afternoon.
Edit: Based on Google Blockly [0]. The university project I was thinking of was MIT App Inventor [1].
It could do absolutely everything that Lua could do. We also added a kind of multifile support, using tabbed views to reimplement libraries on the browser side of things (compiling into separate Lua files).
The idea was that educators at both ends of the spectrum could convert to and from the same visual representations. The primary school classes the uni were running could use blocks, and slowly move to normal Lua, one feature at a time, all the way up to the first and second year ICT programs for higher ed.
Because it could compile to Lua, we could use git and a whole bunch of other tools that already exist. There was an experimental C/asm.js branch to add in FFI support, but that was deemed too time-costly whilst the rest still had a bunch of edge-cases.
And then, unfortunately, the whole program got yanked. But about that time it was close approaching what I would consider "useable" for actual real work.
1) There's a super useful Scratch Curriculum guide - made by the folks from ScratchEd. http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch-curriculu...
2) Blockly seems to be under the Apache license (https://github.com/google/blockly)