(...) I suppose QBasic *can* be used to
teach a lot more programming concepts, since those features are actually in the language!

BobW

Exactly! That's what I meant from the beginning when considering BASIC an all-around fully equipped programming language... I'm glad we finally got around to it. Nice talking to you and this beautiful community I'm recently beginning to get to know.
Cheers!!

Malvinas.

Islas Malvinas, siempre Argentinas!

... Islas Malvinas, siempre Argentinas.

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On 11 Jul 2024 at 02:12p, Malvinas pondered and said...

I agree that one can learn a lot from different languages,
but honestly this sort of use-case feels like exactly the sort
of thing that logo would be better at than BASIC.

Yea, you're probably right, but the thing is, once you accomplish something like a Battleship game, you don't just get a Battleship game, you also know a lot of BASIC, which enables you to go on and try
anything else *on BASIC*... whereas LOGO wouldn't let you get too far
from "a Battleship game"....

Not true! LOGO is actually a dialect of Lisp, and as such,
it's incredibly powerful. People can, and have, written very
robust, complex programs in LOGO; in many ways, it is superior
to BASIC as a programming language (saner rules around scoping
and expressions, for instance).

Unfortunately, few people _learned_ LOGO as a Lisp; most never
got beyond drawing a few basic shapes with the turtle. For
those who did, many could not wrap their heads around functional-
style programming.

More's the pity: it's actually a very nice language.

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(...) LOGO is actually a dialect of Lisp, and as such,
it's incredibly powerful.

Daaaamn.. I didn't know that...

Unfortunately, few people _learned_ LOGO as a Lisp; most never
got beyond drawing a few basic shapes with the turtle. For
those who did, many could not wrap their heads around functional-
style programming.

I use it for programming introduction only in the first two or three classes in my course, and stop using it when students learn how to do FOR[] loops, then move on to pseudo code... Maybe I should stick to LOGO a little longer....
Really didn't know that about LOGO. That's great to know.
Malvinas.

Islas Malvinas, siempre Argentinas!

... Islas Malvinas, siempre Argentinas.

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Re: Re: Is BASIC to be regarded as less than reputable prog lang?
By: tenser to Malvinas on Sun Jul 14 2024 04:21:40

Hi, Tenser.

Not true! LOGO is actually a dialect of Lisp, and as such,
it's incredibly powerful.

I did not know that. My primary school had the turtle things but through my entire school career I never saw one in use. Another fine waste of tax money :)

many could not wrap their heads around functional-
style programming.

Eughhh... flashbacks to university... I am not surprised people struggle with it, I still remember the horrors of trying to master depth-first and breadth-first algorithms using only statements of truth. That was in HUGS, a variant of Haskell - not sure if LISP is easier or harder than that?

BobW
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On 13 Jul 2024 at 09:58p, Bob Worm pondered and said...

Not true! LOGO is actually a dialect of Lisp, and as such,
it's incredibly powerful.

I did not know that. My primary school had the turtle things but through my entire school career I never saw one in use. Another fine waste of
tax money :)

Yeah, this speaks to the history of the thing. I was at MIT
for a talk about the PDP-10 a few months ago, and spoke with
some of the folks who were principle's in Papert's group about
LOGO a bit. Papert was very interested in epistemology and
constructivist ideas about education. He thought computers
would be a good vehicle for students to construct knowledge
about geometry (specifically), math (generally) and computation.
LOGO was a distillation of the ideas of Lisp, where the basic
primitive is a list, in a form that he thought would be
accessible to children; the robot turtle (which was actually a
real robot, connected to the PDP-10 via a serial cable) was
part of that. He wrote about much of this in the book, "Mindstorms".

The problem was that, while the ideas are powerful, you have to
be an expert at computers to successfully transfer them to
computers, and where I think the LOGO effort failed was in
getting _teachers_ well-enoughed versed in the technology _and_
the underly pedagogical theory to be able to use it successfully.

Think of it: these computer scientists from MIT show up in a
school with a microcomputer, and they type a command that draws
a square on the screen; in the early 1980s, that must have been
mindblowing. They exalt the virtues of teaching programming in
this new-fangled language to a bunch of teachers who _probably_
grew up learning about filing cabinets and manual typewriters.
Everyone's excited about the prospects, but then the MIT people
go back to MIT, and the teachers have no idea how to even begin
to approach teaching themselves programming, let alone programming
in Lisp. Pretty much all they know is how to draw a square on the
screen. Now plop them in front of a room full of squirmy,
restless kids who _probably_ think the computer is cool, but
get bored with drawing rectangles really quick. It was almost
doomed to fail because the people charged with teaching it, by
and large didn't understand what they were teaching.

many could not wrap their heads around functional-
style programming.

Eughhh... flashbacks to university... I am not surprised people struggle with it, I still remember the horrors of trying to master depth-first and breadth-first algorithms using only statements of truth. That was in
HUGS, a variant of Haskell - not sure if LISP is easier or harder than that?

Haskell is what's called a "pure" functional language; that is,
one in which there are no side-effects (e.g., you can't change
the value of a variable). Of course, a truly pure language in
this sense isn't good for much; only making your CPU get hot.
The mantra is, "no mutable state." Of course, under the hood
the computer is mutating all kinds of state: registers are changing
values, the program counter is cycling around memory, cells in RAM
are setting and clearing bits, etc: most modern computers are
highly imperative machines (there's a reason we call the simple
operations that the processor actually traffics in "instructions",
after all!), but the language hides this from you.

But you still need to have some effect on the real-world; IO is
a good example. Printing something to a terminal window is a
side-effect. So Haskell wraps all of that up in a mathematical
construction from Category Theory called a "Monad." I won't go
into the specifics of that, but suffice it to say that it can
be very confusing if you don't have a strong background in pure
mathematics (or at least theoretical computer science). To
illustrate, I'll just mention that category theory was created
to address some deficiencies in set theory (a "set" in the
mathematical sense is not well defined, but rather, is intuitive). Specifically, category theory lets us answer the question, "does
the set of all sets contain itself?"

So while Haskell is a neat language, it's got an unofficial motto
that is, "avoid success at all costs." Most Lisp variants are far
more pragmatic, and let you have side-effects and mutable state.
LOGO definitely does. Indeed, LOGO has dynamic variable scoping,
common for Lisp variants at the time, like Maclisp.

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Re: Re: Is BASIC to be regarded as less than reputable prog lang?
By: tenser to Bob Worm on Mon Jul 15 2024 00:40:12

Hi, tenser.

The problem was that, while the ideas are powerful, you have to
be an expert at computers to successfully transfer them to
computers, and where I think the LOGO effort failed was in
getting _teachers_ well-enoughed versed in the technology _and_
the underly pedagogical theory to be able to use it successfully.

Oh, absolutely. One of my good friends is 10 years older than me and I'm sure he mentioned using the turtle in school - this was a different school where presumably there was at least one teacher keen enough to learn the technology and share it with the pupils. Meanwhile in my school the IT knowledge was so minimal that I remember being called out of class at 7 or 8 years old to go and fix a printer for another teacher (and that probably just involved flipping the lever from friction feed to tractor feed).

My wife taught in a primary school for a few years and I think the general "background" level of technology comfort had got to the point where the least technology literate were easily showing very young children how to draw things with the "roamer" bot. I think that was a self-contained educational version of a Big Trak, though, rather than being connected to a computer. I imagine that would be thought of as arcane now, nearly 20 years on.

You seem to know a lot about this, I assume you must either be in or have some strong association with computer science in academia?

Thanks for the detailed response - very interesting.

Cheers,

BobW
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On 14 Jul 2024 at 02:14p, Bob Worm pondered and said...

My wife taught in a primary school for a few years and I think the
general "background" level of technology comfort had got to the point where the least technology literate were easily showing very young children how to draw things with the "roamer" bot. I think that was a self-contained educational version of a Big Trak, though, rather than being connected to a computer. I imagine that would be thought of as arcane now, nearly 20 years on.

Yeah, the situation now is undoubtedly better. On the flip side,
just drawing a triangle on the screen isn't going to impress anyone
anymore.

A lot of the physical computing stuff, where you get a small robot
to walk around a grid on the floor or something, or you interact
with some kind of sensor or something, seems to be the way forward.

You seem to know a lot about this, I assume you must either be in or
have some strong association with computer science in academia?

I'm actually not a computer scientist; I was trained as a
mathematician. But I am a working software engineer, and I
have a lot of contacts in both academia and industrial
research, though in the systems space. I try to attend at
least one academic conference a year to keep abreast of what's
going on on that side of the house, and occasionally drop into
Hackers or something more off-beat to keep up with the other
side.

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Is Lisp a reputable language?

"Simplify after the function is correct" applies to a lot more than the
code you'll write in the recipe book.

"Just because it works, doesn't mean it's correct."

Hell, after reading those again, I think the authors are teaching maturity Don't bother with wahat other people think.

Don't even assume that any language is blessed.

Lisp is brilliant, but not blessed.

I love the correctness first approach, but very few languages
are going to be both this and beginner friendly.

Lisp, or at least any existing dialect, doesn't fit it's own ideals, it seems.

But no one is really crying.
At eleast
not anyone that I know.


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