John Maloney


Principal Investigator

John Maloney (PI) creates live, interactive programming systems. His primary project is a general purpose blocks programming language that attempts to span the space between novices and more experienced (but non-professional) programmers.

In his previous job, John was the lead programmer for Scratch, a blocks-based programming language created at the MIT Media Lab and now used by millions of children around the world. Scratch grew out of John’s work creating Squeak (a portable Smalltalk-80 system written in itself) and the Etoys blocks programming system with Alan Kay’s team, first at Apple and then at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D.

Earlier, with Randy Smith at Sun Microsystems Labs, John created the first version of the Morphic user interface framework for the Self programming language. Morphic was later used as the UI framework for Squeak and for several other programming environments.

In his free time, John plays the dulcian, a Renaissance double-reed instrument that later evolved into the bassoon.

Projects