Lambda the Ultimate

Thanks

Boxer was an attempt to design a successor to Logo. I don't know its status.

I wrote a version of LOGO twenty years ago that made money!8-)) My company had a proprietary graphical application which was very inflexible; we could not customize our displays/drawings or symbols. We couldn't meet bid requirements on many contracts with that software. We had the application source, however, and it exposed a good base API to the display hardware.

I needed a high-level language that was flexible, could be easily understood and that had a terminology familiar to the users. I was taking psychology and computer science courses at the time and had seen LOGO and Papert's work.

I spent two days writing a language specification and the next 3 weeks writing the interpreter, working part-time. The evening before Thanksgiving I worked late and left a test drawing on my desk. Upon returning Saturday morning I found that the senior technician, excited by what I'd left, had gone through my desk, found the language specification and begun using the new interpreter on project data. Now that was user acceptance! I never had to explain the language to him.

With the new interpreter we won those contracts! That was one of my most satisfying programming gigs.

StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems -- systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With StarLogo, you can model (and gain insights into) many real-life phenomena, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies. -- from the website.

It was originally written for the Connection Machine, but the latest incarnation is written in Java.

StarLogo probably qualifies as a COP (concurrency oriented programming) language.

Time for my mandatory plug... I currently work at Northwestern University on NetLogo, which is something of a descendant of StarLogo (via another defunct project called StarLogoT). NetLogo is also written in Java and, in addition to being used in curricular research here, has an active user community of both hobbyists and researchers interested in agent-based modeling.

My impression is that StarLogo is no longer being actively maintained, but perhaps they're just keeping a low profile lately. In either case, I believe NetLogo has significantly surpassed StarLogo in terms of functionality, and we're planning to do a final release of NetLogo 2.0 within the next couple of weeks (a beta is already available).

The documentation is a bit thin on the detailed reference material, in my opinion, but an experienced programmer should have no problem picking it up, and the distribution includes a large number of sample models.

Logo definitely isn't my favorite language, but it's a lot of fun... Hope this isn't too much of a plug...

(Also, post 10000! Go team! Hehe...)

Nevertheless, it has some very neat ideas, mostly related to the graphical representation of a program. It's not like some graphical languages that try to make the entire program into a drag-and-drop exercize, the graphics are limited to code blocks (Logo's [] lists) and richer literals (e.g., a color literal), without forgoing the richness of syntax and grammar using words.

Not really. NetLogo is cool. Let us know when the release is ready!

Dude, where do you live? The used bookstores around here have nothing like this...

Dude, where do you live?

Managed to snag Volume 2 & 3 of the Computer Science Logo Style for $6 a piece. Now I guess I'm committed to buy Volume 1. I'm on vacation this week and I was kind of hoping to start on them for R&R. But then languages are kind of a hobby of mine, and studying new languages is what I do to relax. :-)

Shop on-line at Powell's.

They're here in Portland, but I can't keep them all to myself anyway, so have at it. They have a huge technical department with all kinds of used books.

I've picked up a small library of great books from these sites. Each book cost between about $5 and $15. Possibly I should really join a library instead..