Path: utzoo!utgpu!tmsoft!mason
From: mason@tmsoft.UUCP (Dave Mason)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Educational Software/Programming Languages
Message-ID: <270@tmsoft.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 88 03:46:27 GMT
References: <606@ihopa.ATT.COM> <7210001@hpfclp.HP.COM>
Reply-To: mason@tmsoft.UUCP (Dave Mason)
Followup-To: comp.lang.misc
Organization: TM Software Associates, Toronto
Lines: 25

In article <7210001@hpfclp.HP.COM> gerrie@hpfclp.HP.COM (Gerrie Shults) writes:
>Logo is an excellent language for teaching beginning programming concepts.
>I think Scheme would be better at the high school level, but Logo is
>probably easier to find in your price range.  Scheme has a cleaner syntax,
>though some beginners might be turned off by all the parentheses.  Logo is
>also a dialect of Lisp, but it eschews parentheses for most of the things
>that beginners would do. ...
> ...  There is a 3 volume series by Brian Harvey
>entitled "Computer Science Logo Style", which sounds very good, though
>I have not seen any of the volumes.

I have these books (MIT Press 1985-1987) and I think they're great.
They have just about convinced me that we should be using Logo in our
intro programming course for Computer Science majors (we currently use
Pascal).

When combined with the free (though somewhat slow) Logo that Harvey
posted in volume 10 of comp.sources.unix, it makes a pretty good
exploratory programming environment: Lisp without the intimidating
bits.  I don't have a graphics terminal, so I didn't even gen it to
include turtle support, & I STILL think it's great.  (BTW there's an
unpleasant but VERY weird bug, so talk to Brian or me before you try
to use it.)

	../Dave