From: Vincent Manis <vmanis@...>
Date: 2011-04-15T09:35:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Chad Perrin

On 2011-04-14, at 17:10, Chad Perrin wrote:
> For the record, I agree: Logo, at least in the UCBLogo implementation, is
> a "serious" programming language.  Its limitations as a language suitable
> to "real world" use are entirely a result of the fact that Logo was a
> victim of its own success; it did so well in the '80s as an educational
> language for young children that everybody assumed that was all it could
> do, ignoring its robust capabilities.  It is, in fact, in many ways the
> LISP originally envisioned by McCarthy (which is, in fact, in many ways
> less interesting than what Common Lisp and Scheme have become -- but is
> still an underrated language).

Indeed. The original designers of Logo, Danny Bobrow and Wally Feurzeig, explicitly described Logo as `baby Lisp'. I was involved in that effort a bit, and ended up producing an implementation of Logo, and teaching teachers how to use it for teaching purposes. That latter part soured me quite a lot on teaching computer science in public schools. Most of the teachers couldn't see any other purpose to Logo than manipulating the turtle, and they ended up seeing Logo as a kind of horrible drawing program. In fact, I stopped getting interest from teachers on this subject at almost exactly the time the original Mac and MacPaint were released. The wonderful stuff in Brian Harvey's _Computer Science Logo Style_ was totally beyond these teachers. (By the way, if you look on his website, you can download all three volumes of this series. Even for those who have no interest in Logo, these are fascinating books. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh). 

Ruby and Logo share a certain flavor, including a syntax that is just a little bit hazy :). I kind of wish I were still teaching teachers, it would be fun to teach them Ruby. 

(My apologies to those who are looking for some Ruby talk in this message, there really isn't any.) 

-- vincent