🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <40716@skye.dcs.ed.ac.uk> gvw@epcc.ed.ac.uk (Greg Wilson) writes:
>My two cents worth:
>
>While most discussion of Logo and teaching focusses on young students, I
>think that it (or a tidied up, O-O successor) could be used to teach
>systems programming to college/university students.  When I were a lad,

>How difficult would it be to build a small post-Unix operating system in
>Logo? A compiler construction toolkit? A small windowing system? AFS?

My two cents worth:

GOD NO!!! :-)  I've been using Logo to teach (more like demonstrate) problem
solving to kids for a while.  I think Logo is marginal for a kid/teaching
language, but probably alot better for that purpose than most languages.

I absolutely HATE programming in Logo, even for trivial programs.  I think it's
syntax is horrid, and it's lack of control structures, data types/typing, and
(real) local variables make it very painful to use.  Very poorly suited for
systems programming.  Even if one could write such systems appplications in
Logo without commiting suicide, I'd hate to see them run (crawl).

Your milage may vary...

>Put those together, along with texts of the quality of Harvey or Abelson
>and diSessa, and you would have the core of a coherent, forward-looking
>curriculum.  And who knows? Give it all a decade or two to incubate, and
>it might take over the world like Unix and C did :-). 

It would be so awful, it probbly would :-)


> ========================================================================
>  Gregory V. Wilson                    ||  For in much wisdom is much
>  Technical Coordinator                ||  grief; and he that increaseth
>  Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre  ||  knowledge, increaseth sorrow.
>  gvw@epcc.edinburgh.ac.uk             ||               - Ecclesiastes
> ========================================================================