All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

LOGO

gabor on 2003-08-18T23:12:56

I wonder what happened to the LOGO programming language ?
Is it used now for teaching children or for any other purpose or is it just plain dead ?
I tried to Google a bit for Logo but could not find any new information.

In any case I started to play a bit with it and put together a litle Perl script that is a basic Logo interpreter. Some encouragement would do a great job so I might even make something usable (if not useful) out of it.
So why should I implement a Logo interpreter in Perl ?

Why?

jdavidb on 2003-08-19T01:49:42

So why should I implement a Logo interpreter in Perl?

You're new here, aren't you? ;)

Because you can.

If Logo was a great teaching language, then a portable Logo interpreter would be a good teaching tool. There's a Perl BASIC interpreter out there, too, I remember; emulated Applesoft BASIC and was fun to play with.

IIRC, Logo was billed as a variant of Lisp (but without the parenthesis, I guess), so parsing and interpreting Logo in Perl might be a first step toward parsing and interpreting Lisp/Scheme/etc. in Perl, which sounds like it could have all kinds of interesting applications. On the other hand, if somebody is already interpreting Lisp in Perl, maybe you can draw on that work for your Lisp interpreter.

And Parrot

rafael on 2003-08-19T07:20:33

The fact that Logo is a simple Lisp variant makes it an interesting target for Parrot. (Gabor, did you see Leon's talk about little languages in Parrot in Paris?) But perhaps would you have to port Tk to Parrot first :(

OTOH Inline::Logo could be fun as well.

My mom uses Logo in her math classes.

Louis_Wu on 2003-08-19T06:42:20

My mom has been using Logo to teach logic and geometry for over 15 years, (when I was in her classes) starting with a Commodore 64, and I think she's using a commercial windows distribution now. I don't know how big the Logo user-space is, but if you're interested, I'll ask her.

Re:My mom uses Logo in her math classes.

gabor on 2003-08-19T15:19:48

that would be excellent, please ask her for any pointers I should care.

Re:My mom uses Logo in her math classes.

jdavidb on 2003-08-27T14:45:37

btw, I'm pretty sure there was a free or open source logo distribution out there. I'm thinking that there's a ucblogo under the Berkeley license, or something. Might have even been available as a Debian package.

To LOGO or not to LOGO ...

Theo on 2003-08-27T19:22:00

Louis_Wu called my attention to your post. I won't attempt to advise you on the main question, but can tell you it is being used. My wife teaches a bit of it to Jr Hi kids in her math classes. I have collected some resources to put on her homework page. It might be of interest to you.

Here is the URL: http://www.ucolick.org/user/ted/hw/

-ted-

Re:To LOGO or not to LOGO ...

Reuven M. Lerner on 2003-08-31T16:39:26

As far as I'm concerned, Logo is one of the coolest programming languages out there. I've taught kids to program with Logo, and while it's not designed to be a production-quality language, it does have an easy-to-use syntax and excellent error messages. (Although I must admit that Perl's error messages, particularly when you use warnings and diagnostics, put Logo's warnings to shame.)

I have long told people interested in learning to program that they should buy, read, and enjoy Brian Harvey's amazing three-volume series, "Computer Science, Logo Style." It's a wonderful set of books. If you get through all three, you'll have done 50-80 percent of an intro CS course at a good university.

Of course, it shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that I'm a big Logo fan, given that I'm about to start PhD studies at Northwestern University in the Learning Sciences program. And my most likely research direction will be with Uri Wilensky, author and maintainer of NetLogo, written in Java. Check out this site for more ideas and info.