wrongLogin (03/09/83)
This is mainly a reaction to Mark Horton's comments on LOGO in the "LOGO Summary" article. Mark argued that he preferred Pascal because (among other things) it hides "the fact that programs are edited, compiled, linked and run". I would strongly argue that such details certainly SHOULD be hidden, at least to begin with! It seems clear to me that an interactive environment is best for the learning programmer, since it is so easy to explore, to test small changes in your program or try out new language features. I think the unfortunate popularity of BASIC is largely due to its interactiveness. In addition, the process of interactively debugging a program really makes you think through the code from the machines point of view, and I've always thought that "hand simulation" of code is a crucial step in developing any program. Seymour Papert brings all of this to life in his wonderful book "Mindstorms", which I would recommend to any parent. Admittedly, my target population (non-professionals) may be different from Mark's (although he did mention his son), but even for professionals, it might be a good idea to really get them comfortable with a language/environment like LOGO before throwing them into the more "real" (unfortunately) world of edit-compile-link-run languages like Pascal. Neal McBurnett, cbosg!druxv!neal