From: Surendra Singhi
Subject: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <cnbimv$rsc$1@news.asu.edu>
Hi,
I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
learned logo when they were in grade school.
Any random thoughts are also welcome.
--
Surendra Singhi
www.public.asu.edu/~sksinghi
Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> writes:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
They tought us just the dorky turtle graphics; I'm not sure any of my
teachers actually had much of a clue about programming. I later read
Papert's books (Mindstorms and the other one) and was sorry that I had
been so disdainful of it at the time.
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel ·····@javamonkey.com
Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
Surendra Singhi wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
>
I fired up Microsoft <gasp> Logo (when thirty-something) to find out why
Lisp was considered a 4GL. I later went insanely far with a prototype of
a commercial app in the same Logo. It is not the heat, it is the humidity.
:)
kenny
--
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
From: Surendra Singhi
Subject: Re: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <cnbr3h$are$1@news.asu.edu>
Kenny Tilton wrote:
>
>
> Surendra Singhi wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
>> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>>
>> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
>>
>
> I fired up Microsoft <gasp> Logo (when thirty-something) to find out why
> Lisp was considered a 4GL. I later went insanely far with a prototype of
> a commercial app in the same Logo. It is not the heat, it is the humidity.
>
> :)
>
> kenny
>
Then what happened? Did it materialize?
--
Surendra Singhi
www.public.asu.edu/~sksinghi
In article <············@news.asu.edu>,
Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> wrote:
> Kenny Tilton wrote:
> >
> >
> > Surendra Singhi wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> >> learned logo when they were in grade school.
> >>
> >> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
> >>
> >
> > I fired up Microsoft <gasp> Logo (when thirty-something) to find out why
> > Lisp was considered a 4GL. I later went insanely far with a prototype of
> > a commercial app in the same Logo. It is not the heat, it is the humidity.
> >
> > :)
> >
> > kenny
> >
> Then what happened? Did it materialize?
Yes, but the interpreted Logo was too slow. This was on the new Mac
Plus, a 2mhz box IIRC. I shipped in '87 as a "C" app. I had looked for a
way to stick with the Lisp family, but all I could find was ExperLisp
and that crashed all the time. If MCL (nee Coral Common Lisp) was
available I missed it. Found that a decade later when I went looking for
a Better Way to extend the product.
kenny
From: Christopher C. Stacy
Subject: Re: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <u3bzajjbc.fsf@news.dtpq.com>
Kenneth Tilton <·······@nyc.rr.com> writes:
> This was on the new Mac Plus, a 2mhz box IIRC. I shipped in '87
> as a "C" app. I had looked for a way to stick with the Lisp > family,
> but all I could find was ExperLisp and that crashed all the
> time. If MCL (nee Coral Common Lisp) was available I missed it.
> Found that a decade later when I went looking for a Better Way
> to extend the product.
I had Allegro Common Lisp on my Mac in 1987; this was also known
as Coral Common Lisp (CCL). I think Coral Lisp had been out for
a couple of years before that. This program later turned into MCL.
There is probably a fairly twisted product history here.
As I recall, Coral was a started bunch of AI lab / Logo folks
renting a small office in Somerville. (Franz got involved
a little later. I didn't remember this part at all, but the
version I have is called "Allegro" and my license agreement
says it was with both Franz and Coral.) Anyway, I remember many
of the developers later going down the street to work for Apple,
who had opened a lab staffed mostly by other AI Lab / Logo folks.
I think that's about when they hooked up with another key developer
(who had been one of the principal developers of INTERLISP).
Apple acquired the CCL product, and at some point it became MCL.
Apple used MCL heavily in the development of the Dylan language.
Then Apple closed their lab. (I have forgotten the timeline of
MCL being a third-party, internal Apple, and a Developer product.)
After Apple, MCL was acquired by Digitool and is now developed
and maintained by a small group that includes the aforementioned
hacker and also a couple of the original developers.
Or something like that. I knew most of the people involved, but
was not involved in any of it and lost track on the scorecard!
Someone else here may remember the saga more accurately.
I purchased my copy of Allegro/CCL just for fun on my Macintosh SE,
which was just barely capable of running the environment at all!
I didn't use that computer for any work; I always used Lisp Machines.
The 1987 version would run on a Plus, SE, or Mac II; System 4.1
But CCL wanted minimum 1 MB RAM and 1.6 MB disk. This is an example
of the "Lisp too big" mythical problem. Back in those days, the above
configuration represented a fairly hefty personal computer!
(The max RAM supported by the operating system was 8 MB,
but there was no way to stuff that into my little SE.
I actually ran it with less than 1 MB.)
But as I mentioned at the start, I am pretty sure that the original
version of this particular Lisp system was available well before 1987.
It had own object-oriented language extension (this was pre-CLOS)
which I've written about in other threads, included a version of
Emacs called FRED, and integrated natively with the operating system.
You would write your GUI application using the event loop and toolkit.
I did actually use the MacOS 9 version of MCL for serious work in 2001.
I found it to be an excellent environment.
(Not on my SE, of course....)
In article <············@news.asu.edu>,
Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
I learned some Logo-like language ("Karel the Turtle"?) as
a freshman in high school. It was a 4-6 week unit designed
to transition students from the sloppy and unstructured
Basic we used during the first semester and the Pascal we
were to learn next. I actually thought it did a pretty
good job in that regard, i.e., bridging between GOSUB and
PROCEDURE.
Sashank Varma <····@vanderbilt.edu> writes:
> In article <············@news.asu.edu>,
> Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
>> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>>
>> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
>
> I learned some Logo-like language ("Karel the Turtle"?) as a
> freshman in high school. It was a 4-6 week unit designed to
> transition students from the sloppy and unstructured Basic we used
> during the first semester and the Pascal we were to learn next. I
> actually thought it did a pretty good job in that regard, i.e.,
> bridging between GOSUB and PROCEDURE.
I think you mean "Karel the Robot" - developed at CMU for teaching
pascal to folks who didn't necessarily understand programming.
It had some relatively nice features wrt syntax completion and
prompting for parameters, etc.
--jon
In article <··············@spiritus.delamancha.org>,
Jon Boone <········@delamancha.org> wrote:
> Sashank Varma <····@vanderbilt.edu> writes:
>
> > In article <············@news.asu.edu>,
> > Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> >> learned logo when they were in grade school.
> >>
> >> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
> >
> > I learned some Logo-like language ("Karel the Turtle"?) as a
> > freshman in high school. It was a 4-6 week unit designed to
> > transition students from the sloppy and unstructured Basic we used
> > during the first semester and the Pascal we were to learn next. I
> > actually thought it did a pretty good job in that regard, i.e.,
> > bridging between GOSUB and PROCEDURE.
>
>
> I think you mean "Karel the Robot" - developed at CMU for teaching
> pascal to folks who didn't necessarily understand programming.
>
> It had some relatively nice features wrt syntax completion and
> prompting for parameters, etc.
>
> --jon
I don't know what I mean anymore. I went to CMU as well
(although I never took the Pascal course) so I must be
confusing two very old memories.
Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> writes:
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
I used SuperLogo voor Kinderen in my youth. Basically a Dutch "Logo
dialect" with a simple graphical IDE. Had loads of fun with it. :) But
if memory serves me, it wasn't as advanced as actual Logo.
Kind regards,
Dirk Gerrits
Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
I did in fact run into Logo when I was in grade school, at a science
center summer thingy on computers when I was 10 or 11. I was
programming in BASIC (Whoopee!) on Apple IIs, and we also looked at Logo
as a cool graphics/teaching language. I recall thinking that Logo had a
lot of properties that I really liked. I couldn't identify at the time
that it was it's abstraction capability -- it just seemed like it let me
do things a lot more easily than the BASICs of the time. I remember
thinking something like "too bad it's only for drawing pictures".
Only years later after beating my head against other languages which all
suffereed the same issues as BASIC to lesser degrees, and then
encountering lisp, did I begin to grok why Logo had appealed to me
quickly even though I never did anything serious in it.
Michael
From: Jeff Sandys
Subject: Re: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <419A3D67.4D1DC2F7@juno.com>
I went the other way,
I learned Lisp in 1973
and learned Logo in 1984.
I immediately gronked that by using commands and operations
that Logo eliminated parenthesis from Lisp. I tried to use
Logo on the Apple II to do design automation, that is to
create the top drawing for a greenhouse/solar heater based
standard details and parametric geometry, the measurements
of the southern exposure of a house. It worked in a
rudimantary way, a career change got in the way of
completing the project.
I have used Logo as a volunteer in after school programming
clubs for elementary and middle schools, using UCBLogo
(which has macros and an emacs mode available) and StarLogo,
a multi-turtle and cellular automation version of Logo that
is great for simulations.
But K-12 schools don't teach programming any more, they
focus on using applications, maybe in high school you can
do "html programming" (yes, that's what they call it) with
some flash animation. The middle school students look down
on learning Logo programming and want to learn c (barf IMO)
So I have been looking at using Python (please no flame wars)
because, like UCBLogo and StarLogo, it is cross platform
(macs in the school lab, windows at home) and has a focus
on education (CP4E, Computer Programming for Everyone).
I still think that Logo has the cleanest syntax of any
programming language, Digitool's Object Logo added a clean
object model to Logo, and Elica has integrated packages into
Logo. But Logo has suffered the stigma of being a kid's toy
language and has languished from lack of development and
support. Object Logo is written in MCL and Digitool has
offered it up as open source if anyone is interested in
working on it:
http://www.digitool.com/ol-purchase.html
Thanks,
Jeff Sandys
Surendra Singhi wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
>
> --
> Surendra Singhi
>
> www.public.asu.edu/~sksinghi
From: Surendra Singhi
Subject: Re: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <cndpde$jhf$1@news.asu.edu>
Jeff Sandys wrote:
> I went the other way,
> I learned Lisp in 1973
> and learned Logo in 1984.
>
> I immediately gronked that by using commands and operations
> that Logo eliminated parenthesis from Lisp. I tried to use
> Logo on the Apple II to do design automation, that is to
> create the top drawing for a greenhouse/solar heater based
> standard details and parametric geometry, the measurements
> of the southern exposure of a house. It worked in a
> rudimantary way, a career change got in the way of
> completing the project.
>
> I have used Logo as a volunteer in after school programming
> clubs for elementary and middle schools, using UCBLogo
> (which has macros and an emacs mode available) and StarLogo,
> a multi-turtle and cellular automation version of Logo that
> is great for simulations.
>
> But K-12 schools don't teach programming any more, they
> focus on using applications, maybe in high school you can
> do "html programming" (yes, that's what they call it) with
> some flash animation. The middle school students look down
> on learning Logo programming and want to learn c (barf IMO)
> So I have been looking at using Python (please no flame wars)
> because, like UCBLogo and StarLogo, it is cross platform
> (macs in the school lab, windows at home) and has a focus
> on education (CP4E, Computer Programming for Everyone).
>
> I still think that Logo has the cleanest syntax of any
> programming language, Digitool's Object Logo added a clean
> object model to Logo, and Elica has integrated packages into
> Logo. But Logo has suffered the stigma of being a kid's toy
> language and has languished from lack of development and
> support. Object Logo is written in MCL and Digitool has
> offered it up as open source if anyone is interested in
> working on it:
> http://www.digitool.com/ol-purchase.html
So are there no takers for it?
--
Surendra Singhi
www.public.asu.edu/~sksinghi
I took Mike Zamansky's intro to CS course at Stuy. The first part was
a lot of Starlogo and turtle colonies munching things. That was really
fun. Then we spent a couple of weeks on Scheme. It really didn't click
for me (and wouldn't until I found Abelson and Sussman's _Structure
and Interpretation_ a few years later), but then again, doing
arithmetic by counting cdrs isn't the most exciting thing, and at that
time I wasn't really interested in programming anyway. I do think that
Starlogo is probably the best introduction to programming for kids
today, which if nothing else shows how effective and flexible Papert's
ideas are. Very recently I went through a lot of the original Logo
literature for a research project (about the social history of
"alternative" computing), and in the process stumbled upon Abelson and
diSessa's _Turtle Geometry_ (which is about doing some rather advanced
geometries in Logo), which I'm currently planning to go through when I
have more free time.
Vladimir
I first saw Logo on the Apple II and used it on the Commodore 64. I
wrote the original X code for Brian Harvey's Berkeley Logo. I also
taught Logo to elementary school kids when my kids were in a Coop
school.
I took a stab at writing a Logo-to-Lisp translator/compiler. It sort
of worked in a rudimentary way. I haven't re-visited it for a couple
years now.
--
Fred Gilham ······@csl.sri.com
Thou shalt not convince stupid people to try cordless bungee jumping....
Thou shalt not substitute Semtex when all the Playdough's gone....
Thou shalt not bob for hand grenades....
In article <············@news.asu.edu>, Surendra Singhi
<·········@netscape.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
I just stumbled across some old 1997 Logo books in my library, from
when I was playing with it.
When I was in grade school in 1936, computers were not even around.
Set of 3 volumes by Brian Harvey, total of about 1,000 pages.
(the books are about 8 x 9 inches in size)
"Computer Science Logo Style", 2nd Ed.
(3 seperate volumes, about 360 pgs each)
I do not know if there any more recent volumes of this nature around.
Volume-1 starts out easy, defining basic Logo concepts.
By volume-3, these are the chapter headings:
Automata Theory
Discrete Mathematics
Algorithms and Data Structures
Programming Language Design
Programming Language Implementation
Artificial Intelligence
...all done with Logo code.
It is a very good set of somewhat dated books about serious Logo
programming, very suitable for further education of students who
exhibit an interest in the introductory courses of Logo offered by some
grade schools.
Mark-
From: Surendra Singhi
Subject: Re: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <cngv9n$3r5$1@news.asu.edu>
The message below may be interesting to some. It was taken from logo forum.
--
Surendra Singhi
www.public.asu.edu/~sksinghi
From: Karen Randall <········@ties2.net>
Date: July 20, 2004 11:30:15 AM EDT
To: ·········@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [LogoForum] Status of Logo, research summary
Reply-To: ·········@yahoogroups.com
Status of Logo, observations
My thanks to the 15 people who responded to the questions I posted about
Logo on the Ed Tech, MicroWorlds and Logo forums. Several of you
expressed interest in the outcome of the project, so here are my
observations pulled from your comments. The sampling is not at all
statistically relevant, still it was interesting to find some patterns
to people's thoughts and experiences.
1. Current U.S. Logo users seem to have been at it for a long time.
People wrote about having been introduced to Logo in 1972, or the
80's, or 1995. While many still actively include the language in their
work, lots of comments I received were framed in the past tense.
Sample comments:
"I am convinced that it has great educational value to teach a little
bit of programming.... Students practically taught each other how to
use it. If I showed a student a cool little procedure, within days
everyone in the class would know how to do it because the students would
teach each other. It was the most fun class I have ever taught."
"I am in the last years of my career and it will probably die here when
I retire as no other faculty has shown any interest in its application."
"I'm no longer a classroom teacher. If I was, not sure if I'd be using
it or not. But I'm still convinced it has a lot of value even though
it's not 'flavour of the month'."
" Then I left. ... and MicroWorlds as a technology integration tool
largely vaporized from the school."
2. The strongest responses that documented growing use in school
settings came from England, and links to use in other parts of the world
were also sent along.
Comments:
"We are currently evaluating MicroWorlds EX here in Northumberland (UK).
... The reception has been extremely positive with both staff and
students."
"Here in the UK, here in the UK, we use it a whole lot in primary
education ! ... Our teachers are given extra professional development
by working with the computer systems manager if they are not confident
in working with Logo when they come to our school."
3. While MicroWorlds was referred to by many, there are strong
advocates for other versions of Logo, in particular Visual Logic ,
StarLogo, MSWLogo and UCB Logo.
4. Logo users are a subculture, and joining the culture is not as easy.
This is my own observation, based on an Internet and educational
journal database search and personal experience. Once a new teacher is
introduced to Logo in a math method class, he or she would have to be
pretty motivated to track down the resources needed to really use it. I
have not seen Logo-based offerings at resent teacher conferences in
Minnesota, most journal citations are over 10 years old, and it takes a
great deal of hunting and sorting to get at the specifics of potential
curriculum projects posted on the web.
5. The issues contributing to the limited use of Logo are the same ones
affecting the application of constructivist theory in general.
The current educational climate was cited by many as the reason
programming and project-style investigations are a shrinking part of
school curriculum. Where programming is taught, there is a debate as to
whether the instruction should be in languages which have a marketplace use.
Sample comments:
"The summer before testing was implemented all schools officially
abandoned Logo. A handful of teachers (3) now teach it on the black
market so to speak. ...But in all cases in Colorado, it must be
carefully hidden because the test drives everything. A teacher who
blatantly taught Logo would run the risk of censure if his students did
not also perform very well on the standardized exams. Very few
teachers have enough confidence to risk that."
"The current teach to the test mind frame makes it difficult for
teachers to spend time on projects based learning even if they have
skills and inclination to do so."
"The learning curve for teachers can be fairly steep"
"* not all learners are suited or ready for the demands of problem-solving
with Logo
* very few teachers are suited or ready for it - effective learning through
Logo requires quite a hand-over of autonomy in my opinion
* teachers who taught programming from a commercial perspective didn't like
it because it encourages 'bottom-up' rather than 'topdown' approaches
* it's all about the process but teachers often focus on the product
* it's challenging *and* content-free, the opposite of what many
decision-makers think is important in education
* working with Logo looks a little too much like play for some people's
comfort"
"Since administrators got through their school lives without learning
anything about computer programming, it is largely a mystery to them,
and many cannot appreciate its inherent value nor the beauty and
simplicity of Logo.
Not one single course in programming is required for the Educational
Technology Master's degree."
6. My overall conclusion is that for a variety of reasons, Logo's
technology innovation and integration wave crested a while ago but the
arguments for its use remain strong. To remain viable a new generation
of educators will need access to resources, training and support for
implementation.
Karen Randall
St. Paul, MN
········@ties2.net
LogoForum messages are archived at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LogoForum
Surendra Singhi <·········@netscape.net> wrote:
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
I didn't learned anything about computers in grade school, but there was a
Logo implementation on C64 some 20 years ago. I liked the split-screen with
the turtle graphic above the text input, but it was too slow (at this time
I wrote demos and intros with vertical retrace synchronized animations and
the like), so I used assembler, which leads me to all the other ugly
languages like Pascal, C, C++ and Java, until I finally reached Lisp this
year :-)
--
Frank Bu�, ··@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Surendra Singhi wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
>
My kids were both taught logo in their school at the age of ten. They
did learn a little about programming (recursion, iteration, modules, etc.)
I think that the only thing that they would consider using logo for
(after having learned it) would be creating some kind of graphic or
diagram for a presentation.
> I think that the only thing that they would consider using logo for
> (after having learned it) would be creating some kind of graphic or
> diagram for a presentation.
Brian Harvey, who is one of the people who has sort of kept the flame
of Logo alight, is not particularly interested in the graphical
aspects of Logo. In his 3 vol. series called Computer Science Logo
Style, which is on line, he did a number of significant projects
including a Pascal-to-Logo compiler. He also did a version of Eliza
and some nice mathematical stuff.
To see his stuff, look at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/
--
Fred Gilham ······@csl.sri.com
...the War between the States established...this principle, that the
federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own
powers. -- Woodrow Wilson, explaining who will watch the watchers.
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
I learned Logo using turtle graphics, and also Pilot on the Atari,
which was bundled with a turtle graphics module. I think this was
before I learned Basic, but Basic came shortly after.
I never learned Logo beyond elementary stuff: turtle graphics were the
extent of the I/O I did, I probably never needed more than two or
three subroutines, etc.
As another note, I recently started teaching a friend how to program.
While thinking of different ideas on how to go about this, I tried
pulling out Logo. To test different implementations, I reused the
first Logo program I ever learned, which was called "rose".
Now, let me ask something. I frequently have read that Logo is a
dialect of Lisp. Now, I don't find it very Lisp-like. Can somebody
point out the similarities between Logo and Lisp?
Cheers,
joelh
--
Joel Ray Holveck - ·····@piquan.org
Fourth law of programming:
Anything that can go wrong wi
sendmail: segmentation violation - core dumped
Joel Ray Holveck <·····@piquan.org> writes:
> Now, let me ask something. I frequently have read that Logo is a
> dialect of Lisp. Now, I don't find it very Lisp-like. Can somebody
> point out the similarities between Logo and Lisp?
It has a list data structure, and you can write recursive functions.
Nowadays, I'd advise to use DrScheme as a teaching environment (too
bad it does not include Common-Lisp too). It has a scheme turtle
package.��
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
The world will now reboot; don't bother saving your artefacts.
From: Christopher C. Stacy
Subject: Re: Any users of Logo around? - Survey
Date:
Message-ID: <uk6shjq4v.fsf@news.dtpq.com>
Pascal Bourguignon <····@mouse-potato.com> writes:
> Joel Ray Holveck <·····@piquan.org> writes:
> > Now, let me ask something. I frequently have read that Logo is a
> > dialect of Lisp. Now, I don't find it very Lisp-like. Can somebody
> > point out the similarities between Logo and Lisp?
>
> It has a list data structure, and you can write recursive functions.
Also it's interpreted!
:)
Joel Ray Holveck wrote:
> Now, let me ask something. I frequently have read that Logo is a
> dialect of Lisp. Now, I don't find it very Lisp-like. Can somebody
> point out the similarities between Logo and Lisp?
>
> Cheers,
> joelh
>
Superficially, Logo is kind of like Lisp without parentheses:
print sum 4 product 10 2 vs. (print (+ 4 (* 10 2)))
Many Logo procedures allow a variable number of args if you use
parentheses explicitly:
list 2 3 vs. (list 1 2 3 4)
On a more meaningful level, Logo uses prefix noatation (although modern
Logo's provide for some infix operations), has automatic memory
management, is dynamically scoped (as was Lisp historically), utilizes
an interactive environment (more of a REL rather than a REPL--you have
to explicitly print values), supports recursion and list-processing
(built-in list data type), is a nominally functional language, uses
case-insensitive procedure names...sound familiar? Oh, plus it's
considered non-mainstream and uses ';' to denote comments!
David Sletten
Surendra Singhi wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just curious to know if how many lisp programmers here have
> learned logo when they were in grade school.
>
> Any random thoughts are also welcome.
>
I was studying psychology and computer science and had read Papert's
book _MindStorms_. I was familiar with LOGO and especially with turtle
graphics. My work was in GIS, contracting with seismic navigation
companies, who send ships out to sea to gather seismic data for oil and
gas exploration.
One company's mapping program was extremely limited in its capabilities
and had no general symbol capabilities. To win additional contracts, we
needed something that the data processing staff could learn quickly and
that could provide flexible mapping capabilities. I took a chance and
wrote SEAMAP(c), a version of Logo turtle graphics for seismic
navigation maps. Unlike LOGO's turtle graphics, SEAMAP(c) used
real-world units (meters, feet, miles, etc.).
On a Saturday, the lead data processor saw a test map I'd left on my
desktop, rifled through my desk to find the documentation he knew I'd
written and, after reading it, started producing maps. On Monday, when I
arrived at work and found his suggestions for improvements written on
one of his maps, I knew I had succeeded. Sure enough, the package gave
us the flexibility we needed to bid and win future contracts. I haven't
used LOGO since, but remember it fondly.