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The REPL still lives! You need Racket. There's a lot of great programs now using Racket/WeScheme in education for younger kids. Another project though I think

by jarcane 11y ago

The REPL still lives! You need Racket. There's a lot of great programs now using Racket/WeScheme in education for younger kids. Another project though I think really seems to be gunning for that old-school feel with some modern conveniences is PICO-8, which is a retro Lua VM meant mainly for designing games, complete with REPL, built in editors, and even PEEK and POKE. :D To be honest though, I also kinda wonder how well you'd do just plunking a kid down in front of one of those older machines. Especially the Tandy ones. The Color Computer came with an amazing manual, that's pretty much what got me into programming all on my own as a kid. As a fun side note, here's a Lisp in 1.5 pages of Tandy Color Basic: https://twitter.com/J_Arcane/status/668545293164683264 https://twitter.com/J_Arcane/status/668545293164683264

VLM 11y ago
Pretty sure that is Randy Beer's model 1 and model 3 lisp from 80 micro, part of a multi article series beginning March of '83, see page 176 or so of: https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-03 https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-... It may very well run on a coco unchanged (they were very close) or someone modified it to work on a coco without changing the version remarks. I'm not motivated enough to do a biological meat powered DIFF between the tweet and the magazine. I tried typing it in (in probably summer of 83), LOL thats not happening without typos, ended up convincing my Dad to get the load-80 for that month (essentially load 80 was a cassette tape delivered monthly with the code from the magazine so you don't have to type stuff in). Later Load-80 was a floppy disk. The future being very unevenly distributed it was at least half a decade before IBM PC clone users finally had "big blue disk" (which I enjoyed monthly) It was my first experience with a LISP. I would advise that LISP and magazine series were very interesting but highly non-optimal way to introduce a roughly ten year old kid to LISP. From memory by the third month or so of the series he had a crude database set up and implemented MATCH. Performance was slow, the REPL took maybe a minute to think about complicated things. Its fun to page thru the ads. Dynamic ram had dropped below a buck per kilobyte. 80 micro was going thru a computer science phase, interesting to read the APL article a few pages later. Edited to add, this is Randy Beer's home page today: http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/ http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/
- jarcane 11y ago
  To give proper credit, that's actually a port of the Model I/III Lisp to the CoCo, as printed in Hot Coco magazine. I'm still idle in a few bits of the CoCo scene and someone dug it up a while back so I snapped the code just because I was impressed that 1) it was pulled off in BASIC, and 2) in so little space. Probably indeed not the best introduction to Lisp. I do wish I had had some intro to Lisp, or perhaps more ideally Scheme, back when I was that young though. I honestly believe I'd've stuck with programming if I'd discovered Lisp & FP when I was just starting to look beyond BASIC/QBasic. Instead all I saw was everyone telling me I should learn Assembly or C if I wanted to be a "real programmer", while Python and JavaScript were sneered at as mere "scripting languages," save for those like Perl that were intelligible only to other Perl hackers. Once Java came along and I took two glances at that, I just gave up on programming for another decade, resigned to the idea that coding for a living was nothing more than a life of tedium and irritation. I'm still not always sure I was wrong.
jsjohnst 11y ago
Another vote for Racket. I used it in an after school program [0] I once taught and it was quite easy for the kids to pick up. [0] http://bootstrapworld.org http://bootstrapworld.org

by jarcane 11y ago

VLM 11y ago

Pretty sure that is Randy Beer's model 1 and model 3 lisp from 80 micro, part of a multi article series beginning March of '83, see page 176 or so of: https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-03 https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-... It may very well run on a coco unchanged (they were very close) or someone modified it to work on a coco without changing the version remarks. I'm not motivated enough to do a biological meat powered DIFF between the tweet and the magazine. I tried typing it in (in probably summer of 83), LOL thats not happening without typos, ended up convincing my Dad to get the load-80 for that month (essentially load 80 was a cassette tape delivered monthly with the code from the magazine so you don't have to type stuff in). Later Load-80 was a floppy disk. The future being very unevenly distributed it was at least half a decade before IBM PC clone users finally had "big blue disk" (which I enjoyed monthly) It was my first experience with a LISP. I would advise that LISP and magazine series were very interesting but highly non-optimal way to introduce a roughly ten year old kid to LISP. From memory by the third month or so of the series he had a crude database set up and implemented MATCH. Performance was slow, the REPL took maybe a minute to think about complicated things. Its fun to page thru the ads. Dynamic ram had dropped below a buck per kilobyte. 80 micro was going thru a computer science phase, interesting to read the APL article a few pages later. Edited to add, this is Randy Beer's home page today: http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/ http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/

jarcane 11y ago
To give proper credit, that's actually a port of the Model I/III Lisp to the CoCo, as printed in Hot Coco magazine. I'm still idle in a few bits of the CoCo scene and someone dug it up a while back so I snapped the code just because I was impressed that 1) it was pulled off in BASIC, and 2) in so little space. Probably indeed not the best introduction to Lisp. I do wish I had had some intro to Lisp, or perhaps more ideally Scheme, back when I was that young though. I honestly believe I'd've stuck with programming if I'd discovered Lisp & FP when I was just starting to look beyond BASIC/QBasic. Instead all I saw was everyone telling me I should learn Assembly or C if I wanted to be a "real programmer", while Python and JavaScript were sneered at as mere "scripting languages," save for those like Perl that were intelligible only to other Perl hackers. Once Java came along and I took two glances at that, I just gave up on programming for another decade, resigned to the idea that coding for a living was nothing more than a life of tedium and irritation. I'm still not always sure I was wrong.

jsjohnst 11y ago

Another vote for Racket. I used it in an after school program [0] I once taught and it was quite easy for the kids to pick up. [0] http://bootstrapworld.org http://bootstrapworld.org