🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi, Ken.

Do you know about Boxer?  It's the "successor to Logo" originally designed
by Hal Abelson and Andy diSessa, with continuing development by Andy at
Berkeley.  It's a kind of "visual programming" using boxes to represent
both scope and block structure.

There have been lots of integrations of parallelism into Logo.  Besides
*Logo, which you mentioned, there's TLC Logo, RM Logo, and even the
otherwise execrable Radio Shack Logo.

But I'm not convinced that technical progress is the most important thing
we need right now.  (Of course people should work on technical things; I'm
not trying to argue against that.  Just that I don't think it's the most
important thing to worry about.)  It doesn't seem to me that technical
limitations are mainly what's standing in the way of education reform via
Logo (or in general).

For one thing, even the existing Logo has technical capabilities that are
hardly ever used.  There is by now a pretty substantial literature about
using Logo at the high school level (such as the MIT Press books I listed
a few messages ago), but they're not exactly best sellers.  Most of the
Logo work in practice is still along the square-triangle-house lines.

Another thing is that even the Logo community has backed away from the
radical critique of the institution of schooling that we started with
in the 60s.  Everyone now talks about "integrating Logo into the
curriculum."  In other words, use Logo to do the same stuff you would
have done anyway, what your principal wants you to do.

By the way, I'm skeptical about "visual programming" if you mean something
along the lines of Pinball Construction Kit or Hypercard.  I think that
that sort of thing achieves slickness at the expense of intellectual depth.
That sounds pretty abstract; I guess I mean that you don't learn to think
like a hacker (like a problem-solver, if you prefer) from pushing icons
around.

That's a lot of loose threads to contribute to your desired discussion!
I'm not sure where they all lead to but maybe other people will continue
some of them.