Should LOGO Keep Going FORWARD 1?
Informatics in Education, 6 (2):
307-320 (2007)Abstract
LOGO has been evolving in incremental steps for 40 years. This has resulted in steady
progress but some regions of the space of all programming languagesfor children cannot be reached
without passing through unacceptable intermediate designs.What are the ultimate aims of LOGO?
What criteria and aesthetics should be used in determining which areas of the design space are most
promising? What would the ideal programming language look like? Would a family of specialpurpose
languages be more effective than a single language?
In looking to the future what can we learn from the history of LOGO? What can we learn from
other programming systems for children? Alan Kay is leading a new project entitled, “Steps toward
the Reinvention of Programming”.What are its strengths and weaknesses?
We can conceptualise the design alternatives as defining an n-dimensional space. Some dimensions
represent major alternatives for syntax, others for dealing with concurrency, others for the
underlying computational models, and others for features of the programming environment.
The goal of this paper is to spur a discussion of these issues. I will present my personal opinions
based upon 30 years of research experience in this field.