Logo Programming Language (el.media.mit.edu)

I myself learned programming with logo, at my school when I was 8 or 10. And it was a delight, I am so grateful it existed.

But quite surprisingly, when later during my Ph.D. part of my time was dedicated to give exercises to students. And we used logo instead of the more usual programming languages. And I think it really helped them to really internalise programming a lot better. Typically, the latest exercices introduced recursion which is immediately visible as fractals.

    HIDETURTLE
    
    PENUP
    SETXY -200 0
    RIGHT 90
    PENDOWN
    
    to dragon :degree :size
        setpensize 1
        if :size>5  [setpensize 2]
        if :size>10 [setpensize 3]
        if :size>20 [setpensize 4]
        if :size>40 [setpensize 5]
        ifelse :degree=0 [
            fd :size
        ][
            left  45 dragon (:degree-1) (size/4)
            right 90 dragon (:degree-1) (size/2)
            left  90 dragon (:degree-1) (size/4)
            right 45
        ]
    end
    
    dragon 6 3000

if you want to give a try :)

For many years, our students[0] have used Logo as an integral part of their math circle-style[1] classes. When we started Wally Feurzeig, one of the creators of Logo, was instrumental in helping us incorporate ideas from Logo into the kind of non-standard problem solving that we were striving for. Turtle geometry is a particularly helpful "instrument of the mind" for exploring dynamic geometry. Our co-founder, Victor Gutenmacher, wrote an incredible book[2] on "geometry in motion," which gave a completely different perspective on geometry from the one seen in school and which our students could explore with the help of Logo. For many of our students, especially those with math anxiety, Logo was what enabled them to overcome that anxiety and discover the joy of thinking and tinkering. Many programmers today have fond memories of getting into programming via Logo, but I would argue that despite the current blistering pace of progress, it remains one of the best and gentlest introductions to problem solving and computational thinking.

[0] https://www.gentleknowledge.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_circle

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0817641610

Logo is a serious programming language. People maybe only know it as the thing to teach kids programming via turtle graphics, but people like Brian Harvey at Berkley have used it to teach functional programming rather than Lisp or Scheme.

I still remember when we learned logo in elementary school. I had to get my mom to go out and buy a 3.5" disk so I could save my programs.

When I realized that all of logo was actually saved on that disk and I could continue playing with the turtle at home, I was amazed.

Drawing little things, realizing that I was repeating stuff and breaking it into little functions so I could draw them again more easily. I was learning the essentials of programming and didn't even realize it.

I'm forever grateful for having the access to Logo programming in early 90s, as a kid from a 3rd world country, for how it leads to where I am today.

My first ever english word that I can spell out is REPEAT.

I didn't win logo programming competition in polish equivalent of 7th grade and I am still salty about it

This is on top of HN right now, and there is still nobody who has mentioned the fact that the tier-1 book Turtle Geometry <https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/4663/Turtle-Geomet...> , is in open access.

Do yourself a favor, and read it today : it is that good. Even though it is quite depressing to see that the revolution in education that the book was predicting in its preface, simply never happened.

Logo was created by by Seymour Papert. I highly recommend his book Mindstorms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) It was written in 1980 but could have mostly been written today. All the same issues with teachers misunderstandings and fear of math and technology and refusal to change to meet the challenges of the age.

Kicked off so many memories...

Early 80's I learned Logo and Basic at a local store that sold Apple computers. It was called "The Logical Choice" and had a classroom tucked away behind a false wall and an English Sheep dog "Sir Isaac Newton" that would hang around the store!

Nice, I just found a story on the store, page 5 of [1].

[1] https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...

My favorite logo on macOS is https://www.alancsmith.co.uk/logo/ First dabbled with logo on my apple ][, attracted by turtle graphics like many others.

LCSI LogoWriter for 68k Macs[0] was my shit. It was my first[1] introduction to programming in elementary school and I spent hours trying to make games with it. There were 4 turtles and you could treat them like sprites; you give them custom shapes and colours, and there were basic collision detection primitives. You could also check for collisions with the background by querying the colour under a turtle. You could play and record your own sounds... spent so much time with that little round Apple microphone[2] recording goofy sound effects.

[0] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6717-logo-writer-2-0

[1] technically I had used the Apple II version a couple times first

[2] https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/macintosh-to-p...

Back in 1983, my elementary school was a part of a Logo pilot program. We had a lab of Commodore 64's that I had free run of (my mom was a teacher there), and it's why I do what I do all these years later.

What I find interesting it that it's not just programming, specifically. Logo is a highly interactive and dynamic language (a relative of Lisp), and that influenced the way I think about writing code. Seymour Papert did a lot for me, albeit highly indirectly.

https://mschaef.com/c64

Logo was my introduction to programming. Working on a 1 MHz Commodore64, my masterpiece was a fireworks show that was animated by the fact that the individual drawing commands were so slow you could watch them play out.

So, draw a curve from the ground to the sky. Draw some explosion shape. Change pen color to the sky color. Draw the curve and the explosion again to erase them. Change pen color and start the next firework.

Anyone here remember a 1980's Logo-programmable robot that I once used in a TAG program? It had a pen, we would lay it on top of a giant sheet of paper.

It was like a little futuristic tank. I searched for a minute, and I cannot find the exact model. Did I imagine this?

Logo is a real surprise if you revisit it as a grown professional. Remarkably elegant language.

I'm not seeing any shout-outs to MSWLogo! I loved being able to create dialog boxes and UIs!

Also, The Great Logo Adventure is a great book for kids learning Logo. It's what I learned with, and it's available as a free PDF now!

This on-line version of Logo is pretty great: https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/

I have fond memories learning about Logo from Mr. Wizard!

As a child, I really enjoyed Logo. It appeared as a sidebar on a math textbook about angles and line segments. I studied it like I studied everything else in the textbook, but I didn’t immediately realize it was a programming language, a means to control a computer. Fast forward a few years in elementary school, when the teacher actually began to teach Logo with all students in front of a computer, it was such a profound revelation for me.

During the second Logo class, the teacher set up a competition. A prize was to be given to the student who could first plot an equilateral triangle, a square, a regular pentagon, a regular hexagon, etc, up to a regular icosagon. I won the prize because I wrote formulas to make the computer do the angle computation. I was so so proud of myself compared to my classmates who were computing angles with pen and paper. It felt like the first inkling of the power of automation.

When I was seven I wrote my first program. It was in Terrapin Logo and evenly tiled the monitor of my elementary school's Apple IIe with hexagons.

It's been all downhill since.

They taught us Logo at school in the early 90s in Lima, Peru. I'll never forget the aha moment of going from "forward 10, left 90" to "repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]" and bam a circle! They had us bring a formatted 5in floppy disk (they were indeed floppy) to our first class; what was this sorcery?

It’s 1998, I’m 10, it’s a gloomy autumn morning, in Klaipeda (pop. 200k), Lithuania, eastern Europe. I’m at school. Informatics class. Never touched a computer before.

The computer is running windows 95. The teacher starts Logo and I see that turtle in the middle of the screen. She explains how to make it move.

And I start typing my very first code.

It’s lisp based. Took me 28 years to learn that. Now I think I need to finish the job and pock up lisp.

Didn't notice it as a kid but Logo is an absolute masterpiece if you think about raw impact on the IT world.

70 comments here and they're basically all positive about Logo being formative

Oh my god - Logo, brings back memories of my childhood and my first "microcomputer": ZX Spectrum +. I spent countless hours trying to force the damn turtle to draw shapes I wanted it to. Unbelievable that this language is still alive.

I had a great teacher in primary school who introduced us to programming with Logo. We ran a variant called MSWLogo - it was my gateway drug, and how I learned what "paisley" was. Good times!