This brings back fond memories of my 1 year at UC Berkeley back in 2005-2006 and getting my start learning about Computer Science fundamentals with Professor Harvey and CS61A.
Afterwards I always told myself I'd jump in at some point and play around with Logo (since the books were freely available on his page since forever it seems) but I had forgotten about those thoughts until seeing this post right now.
I had him back in 1997 in CS61A. Will never forget that class. It was way oversubscribed due to some administrative issue. So he had the whole class on Day 1 take a test: Write a app in any language you know to solve the Tower of Hanoi (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~shidi/cs61a/wiki/Towers_of_Hano...). Whoever passed it was in the class.
It was damn intimidating. My first ever lecture in my first ever class at Berkeley, first time at a university and first time in America. I'm still a little proud I could do it back then.
Overall, I would say folks may not have appreciated him as much in those lectures as you might expect (if you've watched the online versions of them, they were basically the same as those...unfortunately we probably weren't the most active class participants either with everything else going on in each student's day-to-day life).
I actually learned more about his personality by reading Simply Scheme for the precursor class to CS61A (CS3) since I was a complete noob to programming at the time...his book was really fun to read though and I learned a lot that semester.
I think I ended up reading a couple of Brian's essays on his UCB page as well, which helped me gain some additional appreciation for his background.
A few years later I picked up a copy of the book Hackers (by Steven Levy) and it was there (during the section about the early days of the MIT Hackers) that I saw his name mentioned and I thought it was so cool that I had had him as an instructor :-).
You used to be able to find the "greatest hits" of his lectures (as well as the ones from 61B and C) at http://wla.berkeley.edu. Unfortunately, it looks like the site is down right now... or forever? (The lectures were in RealPlayer format, so maybe it's for the best.)
I think they moved off of the older Realplayer-based sites and onto Youtube...they pretty much have every version of CS61A online from the past few years...here's a playlist of one of the last ones taught by Professor Harvey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l28HAzKy0N8&list=PL3E89002AA...
I love Brian Harvey. He sits in on my compilers class and gives Prof Bodik a hard time. Seems like every other class you hear Harvey yell, "Nooo" from the back of the room. Its hilarious.
Sometimes, at an advanced level of teaching, these kinds of 'interventions' are pre-planned by teachers to put two sides of a question. Students love it.
Unplanned interventions can make it harder to present hard ideas. Quite often in maths you have to present hard stuff as a process of 'diminishing deception' or as a move from concrete things in the world through procedural routines to abstract concepts, see
and the sample Chapter 1 for one model of that process.
I'd imagine a colleague who has a different way of unwinding the ideas jumping in part way through a presentation like that might reduce the clarity of the presentation.
That's actually exactly what I'd imagine he'd do (it would be even funnier if he was chucking potstickers at him...for those that don't know that's an inside joke from his Simply Scheme book...I can't remember if it was also mentioned in CS61A too :-).
I blame LOGO for opening my programming mindset beyond the confines of BASIC on a VIC-20. In 1986, that was the only tool readily available to me until an after-school class introduced me and other interested kids a bunch of computer stuff, including LOGO.
It's a bit rough around some edges, but http://turtleacademy.com/ is a decent site for introducing people of all ages to LOGO.
Chris Hancock designed and implemented languages called FLOGO I and FLOGO II in the early 00s; unfortunately you can only read about them in his dissertation:
This work has been very inspirational to my own research as it introduces a concept known as live programming. The dissertation is also very well written and interesting to read even without a deep PL/HCI background.
Before that, I played around with BASIC, but was only moderately interested in programming. But as an 8 year-old seeing a set of lego blocks come to life with just a few simply commands was truly life-changing experience!
Looking at today's Mindstorm, it's just amazing how far things have come!
Reading the Mindstorms book made me want the Lego Logo kit for my kids. The things in the book seemed like mostly basic Lego constructions with a bit of automation added, which seems more accessible than the Technic based set, which requires more planning.
I may just bite the bullet and get the Mindstorms set for myself this Christmas.
There are also alternative firmwares (e.g. http://www.ev3dev.org/ ) which let you use more or less the language you want, but you loose the IDE integration and the easy setup.
And the original firmware is open-source too: https://github.com/mindboards/ev3sources
Since some are reminiscing, I thought I'd throw in.
I owe my interest in computers to, among other people, Mr. Wizard. It wasn't frequent, but when he pulled out the old (Apple IIe maybe?) and taught kids how to write Logo, I knew I had a new mission in life.
That, and the gratuitous use of fire around children appealed my reckless grade school brain.
I love that these books are still in print. One of the first things that I did when Mac OS X came out was download the Unix source and get UCB Logo running. There was a good discussion group at the time and Professor Harvey was incredibly gracious with his time answering all kinds of questions.
Here's a link to Professor Harvey's papers page (the link is a little hard to notice on his main page):
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/papers.html
(it has a couple of neat Logo essays in there)
I just started reading "Logo mindstorms". The book arrived this morning. I ordered it because Bret Victor strongly recommends it. Hope to learn me some LOGO this weekend!
Same here, somewhen back in primary school my father installed logo for me to play around with instead of paint. When I asked him how it works, he told me in fatherly affection:"RTFM". He later repeated the stunt by handing me a copy of K&R when I asked him whether he could teach me programming.
Now on the one hand, it taught me to RTFM, but on the other, i got stuck on something in either language and ended up quitting (drawing chairs in logo, bit shifts in C since I didn't know how binary really worked or what an exponent was). It makes me wonder what the better parenting approach is, letting your children learn to figure things out on their own, or helping them across whatever bumps they encounter, or some mix between the two.
I think NetLogo is lexically scoped, maybe StarLogo too? A really long time ago I wrote a translator from Logo to Scheme: http://web.archive.org/web/20071231105705/http://www.colorst... – it translates fairly directly, and so it uses lexical scoping. The version is also lisp-2 by default, but has a lisp-1 option.
Yes, NetLogo is lexically scoped, and it has first-class functions (we call them "tasks") and higher-order functions. But it isn't homoiconic (unlike e.g. Berkeley Logo) so it doesn't really qualify as a Lisp IMO.
Afterwards I always told myself I'd jump in at some point and play around with Logo (since the books were freely available on his page since forever it seems) but I had forgotten about those thoughts until seeing this post right now.
To Professor Harvey :-)!