Re: LOGO-L> Numbers or Words?

[tlbelding@htcomp.net (Tony Belding)]

On 25-Jun-97, George Mills wrote:

>Don't get me wrong, logo is very cool, very powerful and fun
>and yes you can code up in a couples lines in what might take
>pages of code in Pascal/C.

>But at a huge cost in performance and allowing you to write
>code that can sometimes be dangerous. Although you can do some
>truely nifty things in C++.

>How many commercial systems do you see written in Logo?

None.  And it's interesting to look at the reasons why.

For one thing, Logo is an *old* language.  It was designed before
structured programming really took hold, and long before OOP or visual
programming was even thought about.  Language design has come a long way
since then.  That doesn't really mean you *can't* make large and complex
programs with it.  You just have to pay special attention to keeping code
and data properly organized.  Logo doesn't force you to do that.

Logo got a bad reputation, ironically, as a result of its success with
education and teaching programming to children.  The turtle graphics didn't
help in that respect, so Logo became thought of as a toy.  Never mind that
it has most of the same power as LISP.

Many dialects of Logo, such as Berkeley Logo, hold cross-platform
compatibility so high, they can't even figure out what resolution they are
running in, much less load images, play sound samples, open windows,
present GUI objects, etc.  There are limits to what you can do with a text
console and a turtle.

And, as you note, Logo is not the most efficient language around.  In fact,
it's probably one of the least efficient.  There's the interpreted nature
of it, and the heavy reliance on recursion, even for jobs where a simple
stack (Forth) or iterated loop (BASIC) would be better.  There's the lists,
the typeless data, etc.  All this slows it down.  It's rather amazing to
me that Logo was promoted as an alternative to BASIC in the early 1980s.
The home computers (bitty boxes!) of that era were not up to it.

I think Logo has its place, despite all those problems.  Beginners and
casual programmers don't care about OOP.  In fact, an "archaic" language
without such things is probably an advantage for beginners writing
relatively small programs.  And efficiency is not such a problem with the
arrival of processors like Pentium and PowerPC.  Now, if we could just get
some multi-media extensions...

I'm working on that.  I'm looking at how to add some primitives to Berkeley
Logo to make it more widely useful.

I remember a time when computers came with BASIC.  Nowadays most people
have been conditioned to think of programming in the same context as brain
surgery or rocket science.  Unfortunately, that's not far from the truth
when dealing with C, C++, or Java.  It doesn't have to be that way!

--
   Tony Belding
   http://hamilton.htcomp.net/tbelding/

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