I would love to be able to just type the command line in; dragging blocks around is really slow and unnatural. But probably I'm not the target audience...
My thoughts exactly. Furthermore, this would be great training/practice for eg. Linux Foundation certifications with just the questions and "here's a terminal, go solve it".
it reminds me of the early LEGO robotics programming setup - and how NQC (not quite c) was much easier to use for those with familiarity with programming.
Part of the problem is there are hundreds of ways to use unix tools to get the correct response, so you'd need an entire shell and output parsing to prevent frustration.
> Part of the problem is there are hundreds of ways to use unix tools to get the correct response, so you'd need an entire shell and output parsing to prevent frustration.
I think that's part of the beauty!
But you could still support only some common POSIX tools, basically, the ones they've got "blocks" to pull from.
If I could type these in, I'd have a lot more fun — this way, I gave up after the intro questions because it's so time consuming.
They also used that block-code setup for a game, Stormrunner where you control a robot with the mindstorms block language. Kind of like Logo but with sweet graphics.
I figured that was just a convenient way to avoid all the security problems that come with exposing a shell online whilst also limiting the inputs, although I'm sure there's other ways to do that. Might be nice to have the option I guess.
