Education typically prepares young people for professional life, equipping them with the skills to meet industry demands. Occasionally, however, the flow is reversed - educational research reshapes the industry itself. Historically, work on educational programming languages has sparked innovations like personal computing, graphical user interfaces, and the object-oriented programming paradigm.

In recent years, visual programming languages - where scripts are built by snapping together graphical blocks - have become a powerful tool for introducing programming to novices. But could there be more to these blocks than just their use in education? Could they point to a broader, transformative approach to programming itself?

In this talk, I’ll explore the Snap! visual programming language and showcase its recent developments, where blocks become first-class citizens of the language. By treating blocks as a computational domain, Snap! demonstrates how blocks can surpass their textual counterparts in expressiveness and versatility. This shift may offer new ways to form mental models of computation, potentially laying the groundwork for a new programming paradigm.

Join me as we examine the exciting possibilities of a block-oriented approach to programming and consider whether this marks the beginning of something much bigger.