From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2011-04-15T09:59:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Chad Perrin

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On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Vincent Manis <vmanis@telus.net> wrote:

> 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
>


Logo was the first "programming" I ever did. We didn't have an official
curriculum that I know of, but me and another kid had to make a story with
it, so we had to give it commands to draw each scene. Ours was Sonic the
Hedgehog :P and I really enjoyed it, and think that is one of the reasons
that I stayed so interested in programming for all these years. (Though I
did have a qbasic course in HS, which I also loved).

By surprising coincidence, I was playing with it today, since Heroku had a
segment in their last newsletter about supporting it (
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/4/1/announcing_heroku_for_logo)

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