LOGO-L> Re: LOGO-L> Is Logo old technology?

["Ken Kahn" <KenKahn@ToonTalk.com>]

Wen provided a good example in MicroWorlds of my point about the dangers of
concurrency in languages with shared state (the variable owned by the Parent
process in his posting). Thanks.

His question is about how important this issue is. It would not surprise me
if many readers of this news group have taught MicroWorlds for years and
never seen a kid run across it. Why should we care? One reason is the
principle that we shouldn't give kids programming tools that us adults
wouldn't use. Another reason is that kids that do get ambitious and may
start to explore what kinds of parallel programming they can do in
MicroWorlds will run up across these problems. These problems are very hard
for professional programmers to detect, track down, and fix. And even worse
is that MicroWorlds doesn't give its users the tools to deal with these
problems (locks or critical regions, for example).

Best,

-ken kahn (www.toontalk.com)


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