🚀 go-pugleaf

Ben, thanks for your comments.  I noticed that you are in Halifax.  I
would have expected you to mention Prograph in connection with good
quality visual programming. (I personally have been very disappointed
with most of the work in visual programming but I feel strongly there is
huge potential here.  Let's make good use of our sensory apparatus when
we program and debug!)  Prograph is pretty good.  It was developed in
Halifax (the Technical University and Gunakara Sun Systems).  It
currently runs only on Macs and provides a very well designed visual
formalism and programming environment.  The computation model is a good
marriage of dataflow (with nice iterators) and visual Smalltalk.  I am
not claiming that Prograph is suitable for children -- but that it's a
good source of ideas and an example of the kinds of progress being made
that should be made available to kids.

One thing that Prograph lacks that I think is very important is a good
way to visualize the execution of a program.  I want to see animations
of what my programs are doing.

Regarding Brian's comment

    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.

I should find out more about these.  I've got TLC Logo (from Lego Dacta)
and didn't notice any parallel constructs -- are there different
versions?  But even though I think parallelism is very important I am
skeptical that the right approach involves parallel "threads".  I lean
much more heavily towards actors and concurrent logic programming (which
I see as a nice generalization of actors).  

Not surprisingly my work over the last few years has been on a system
for visualizing concurrent logic programs as pictures and their
executions as animations.  While I think this greatly helps in learning
the basic concepts, in creating good programs and debugging them, I am
not willing to claim that I've gotten to a point where it's suitable for
children.  But I'm thinking hard about the next generation along these
lines and I am hopeful that it will be.

 -ken