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Why isn't the logo language developed into a proper programming language?
I really like the logo programming language, it's strong support for cellular automata is especially nice. It has a similar syntax but does not contain as much parenthesis as lisp while retaining still retaining all of its power. Why hasn't there been work done to turn logo into a general purpose language complete with and IDE and everything?
- GregBuchholz 12y agoWhat implementations are you using? FMSLogo seems pretty full featured, and aUCBLogo has an IDE looking editor. http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/ http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/ http://aucblogo.org/en/Screenshots.html http://aucblogo.org/en/Screenshots.html
- tree_of_item 12y agoI think one of the motivations behind Logo is being a low complexity environment for learning about computation. Bloating it up with all the trappings of professional software development would seem to defeat the purpose.
- davelnewton 12y agoIt already is a GP language, it just happens to be specialized, by design, to serve a particular niche.
- networked 12y agoRebol (http://rebol.com/ http://rebol.com/) and Red (http://red-lang.org/ http://red-lang.org/) may be considered "proper" (i.e., production-ready) programming languages derived from Logo. They share a good chunk of its parentheses-optional syntax. Example code (taken from http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0004.html http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0004.html): foreach file read %./ [ if find [%.txt %.text] suffix? file [ write file replace/all read file "web" "rebol" ] ] The same with parentheses: (foreach file (read %./) [ (if (find [%.txt %.text] (suffix? file)) [ (write file (replace/all (read file) "web" "rebol")) ]) ])
- networked 12y agoI should correct what I wrote above: Red is not yet production-ready but it aspires to be a more modern, open source alternative to Rebol 2 for use in production. (Rebol 2 is now closed-source freeware; it used to cost a lot of money and be marketed towards the enterprise.)
- brudgers 12y agoWhy hasn't there been work done to turn logo into a general purpose language complete with and IDE and everything? The big fuzzy picture of languages includes a community of speakers/users. The community is what distinguishes living and dead languages. The Logo community has not developed tools for doing tasks for which are not part of the ecosystem it inhabits. Let the base case be the set of reasons you have not developed an IDE, etc. The proof is an induction.
- jarcane 12y agoThere are a number of modern Logo languages like NetLogo and so forth, and even older Logos were actually capable of quite a lot more than advertised (Color Logo for the TRS-80 Color Computer even included a chapter teaching recursion!) The trouble is that little teaching with Logo ever goes that far, focusing on a very imperative simple base syntax to make the little turtle move around, and then promptly moves to some other language to teach actual structured programming. A language needs people to grow up and keep using it to survive, and no one grew up just using Logo; they all moved to Basic or JavaScript or Python or Scheme. And since Logo doesn't do anything any other Lisp can't already do, there really wasn't much point with sticking with it.