4 ms·

I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. While I have never worked as a prof

by ylee 3y ago

I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

knome 3y ago
>at the moment I understood what recursion is I remember the exact moment I first discovered recursion. Some fantastic individual in our early 90's school district had arranged for LOGO clubs to be created in various schools, and even had a little competition at the end of the year. Recursion was, apparently, the thing my team didn't know how to do to make those nested squares one of the problems required :)
mbork_pl 3y ago
> I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment. Given that LOGO is a Lisp dialect, that sounds resonable.
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  Yup. Lots of people forget that. They see turtle graphics and think LOGO is a toy. I learned Lisp very shortly after learning LOGO and was introduced to recursion in Lisp. It was several years before I got back to LOGO on the TI 99/4A and (of course) tried out recursion related to building adventure games. IIRC, TI Logo only allowed 4 or 5 levels of recursion (I guess it wasn't using tail recursion?). I keep hearing about m-expressions, and think about how they're similar to the LOGO syntax (though I don't think they're exactly the same.) Worth reading if you haven't heard about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression Especially if your biggest critique of Lisp is "all those annoying parentheses."
OhMeadhbh 3y ago
I the old days, I remember the adults all saying "Everyone will know a little programming in the future. It will be like the development of wide-spread literacy from the 17th through the 20th centuries." Doing some programming on the side as a hobby or as an adjunct to other professional work is "on track" with what the computer science luminaries from the 70s were saying. Though... I've often said Excel is a programming language, only that you get to program a data-flow virtual machine one cell at a time. So... I think more people are programming than know it.

by ylee 3y ago

knome 3y ago

>at the moment I understood what recursion is I remember the exact moment I first discovered recursion. Some fantastic individual in our early 90's school district had arranged for LOGO clubs to be created in various schools, and even had a little competition at the end of the year. Recursion was, apparently, the thing my team didn't know how to do to make those nested squares one of the problems required :)

mbork_pl 3y ago

> I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment. Given that LOGO is a Lisp dialect, that sounds resonable.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
Yup. Lots of people forget that. They see turtle graphics and think LOGO is a toy. I learned Lisp very shortly after learning LOGO and was introduced to recursion in Lisp. It was several years before I got back to LOGO on the TI 99/4A and (of course) tried out recursion related to building adventure games. IIRC, TI Logo only allowed 4 or 5 levels of recursion (I guess it wasn't using tail recursion?). I keep hearing about m-expressions, and think about how they're similar to the LOGO syntax (though I don't think they're exactly the same.) Worth reading if you haven't heard about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression Especially if your biggest critique of Lisp is "all those annoying parentheses."

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

I the old days, I remember the adults all saying "Everyone will know a little programming in the future. It will be like the development of wide-spread literacy from the 17th through the 20th centuries." Doing some programming on the side as a hobby or as an adjunct to other professional work is "on track" with what the computer science luminaries from the 70s were saying. Though... I've often said Excel is a programming language, only that you get to program a data-flow virtual machine one cell at a time. So... I think more people are programming than know it.