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
p.s. same as you, I was introduced to Logo around the age of 8 and I remember writing programs on paper when I was home, stepping through them line by line... it was inevitable I'd gravitate towards programming, ha :-)
I was also introduced to computer programming using LOGO back in 1989. I remember drawing houses and stick figures in it.
Fast forward around 2010, I gave Agent Based Simulation workshop courses to PhD students using NetLogo , which at the time was very popular in the Social Sciences.
It was very interesting to teach programming to non-tech very intelligent people. Some of them came up with really cool simulation ideas. I loved that part of my career.
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.
In the early nineties in elementary school I lived in Belgium, and went to a summer camp where we programmed with Logo in a localized French version.
I had played with Logo on Apple IIe's in the US, and thought it made sense that in a French-speaking region[0] they'd have a French version. I relearned what little I already knew, but regrettably, this did not help greatly with my French skills.
All I remember from this is that `hazard' was the random built-in. Dunno why that's stuck, but there's probably some more important bit of information that should be in my brain if that weren't.
[0] Yeah, yeah, I know French, Flemish, and German are the official languages. I was in a French-speaking part.
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.
Also as a child, I was amazed by the associative tables it offered; I thought "I can make intelligent programs". I think I was thinking AI but I won't trust my memory on this. But I played a lot more with the turtle.
We had it (or one of the clones) in middle school, but it was a demo version that had saving disabled. Half of each class was messing with the turtle. The other half was writing down the code with pen and paper so that we can have it graded.
I remember learning LOGO in school. There was a single 4K computer for the entire school, so we learned how to program by calling out turtle commands to the teacher who would draw the results with a marker on a sheet of plastic on an overhead projector.
At the end of that exercise, the accumulated commands would be taken to the computer (in another part of the school) and entered into the computer, and eventually we'd get a plotter printout showing the results.
Those early days of computing feel like we were like being on another planet.
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.
The first line of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) is "Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon." so you are correct but it is nice to mention his co-inventors. I agree about the book. I had to borrow it from a friend, read it quickly and give it back in 1983 so my memories of it are a bit fuzzy.
I learned the Language through examples because the version provided by the school didn't have documentation and in 00s Poland internet was still relatively rare.
I... participed in the competition, but that's all.
I used to get in trouble for making it play various noises of increasing hilarity via the inbuilt speaker . Always in bother but learned a lot and lots of fun!
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].
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Very similar to my story. Sometimes I feel sad that I'll never know who was the enlightened administrator in my humble district who somehow got my elementary school an Apple computer lab with Logo in 1983, and that they'll never know what an impact it made on my life.
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.
Logo started my love of programming. I will always be thankful for it and that little turtle. IIRC there was a limit of 128 stamps in LogoWriter and my sister and I would fight so much about it.
I learnt that I must be good at computers when in 4th grade, despite never having touched a PC before, I not only managed to ace my Logo class but was asked by my teacher to help out other struggling students (I am just realising that essentially made me a TA in our class). I still remember trying to understand the Pen Up and Pen Down commands from a book with no immediate access to a PC to try them on.
Logo is in my heart forever. The first PL I was introduced to and made me love programming for life. It was MSW Logo if I’m not mistaken and that turtle was a lot of fun.
I consider Logo an undeservedly forgotten technology that showed the world a glimpse of what computerized education really is, and Seymour Papert is a misunderstood genius ahead of his time.
The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.
Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.
Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".
One of the first interesting programs I made was LOGO in flash (actionscript) :D It's a great tool for learning basic programming since it's interactive, graphical, and simple.
Yeah, somehow I owe my entire software engineering career to that flower and garden program example. There was something about being able to add new words based on primitives, and new words based on custom words, that captured me for good.
Berkeley Logo was one of my first programming languages. The idea of declaring functions with the keyword “to” still feels like a fun and good idea, even though of course it doesn’t matter. Just a different perspective.
NetLogo is its own language, but definitely inspired by and modeled on the original Logo (thus the name). But it has some differences in syntax and semantics, and is oriented toward agent based modeling (which also introduces some new syntax and semantics).
Logo was the first programming language I ever learned. I was in third grade in Seattle, Washington, around 1989, and I absolutely loved it. Looking back, not hard to see that it was responsible for sparking a lifelong love of technology and programming.
TThe only reason we got to learn it at all was because one of the daycare workers was a graduate student at the University of Washington. She somehow got permission for any of the kids who were interested to use the school's computer lab. Which, I think, took some doing on her part.
Back then, computers were treated like sacred objects. They made a huge deal about kids using them. The whole first week of the class was basically some grumpy old guy with a white beard telling us, "These are not toys! These are expensive machines!"
We had to wash our hands before we were allowed into the computer room. The old guy would literally "hand check" us at the door. You had to hold out your hands and show him that they were clean before you were allowed anywhere near the computers.
Logo was a lot of fun. We had a competition to see who could draw the coolest thing. Just like foundation for a "hackathon" really. Every day, "OK, Kids, you have 30 minutes, let's see what you can do!" Was a lot of fun.
I had to ask my mom for a floppy disk. "Mom, I need $5 for class supplies..." And then I had to explain that it was for a computer disk... and she had to call the school to make sure I was getting the right thing... even though I told her 100 times that I needed an un-formatted 5.25" disk! Ha.
Anyway good memories here. Logo and HyperCard were gateway drugs.
We used Logo on Apple IIs quite a bit in the 80s but I don't have fond memories because Logo is one of those things that at the time when using it one had no idea (and neither did the teachers teaching it) that there was something of much more substance behind it than just drawing lines and circles on the screen. Which was frankly kind of boring. We'd get as far as simple procedures but that's it.
There's a whole Lispy beauty behind the language that teachers didn't know how to transmit to the kids because they themselves didn't understand it. The emphasis on turtle graphics was limiting.
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.
if you want to give a try :)I tried it on https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ and saw this small typo
cheers!
p.s. same as you, I was introduced to Logo around the age of 8 and I remember writing programs on paper when I was home, stepping through them line by line... it was inevitable I'd gravitate towards programming, ha :-)
Fast forward around 2010, I gave Agent Based Simulation workshop courses to PhD students using NetLogo , which at the time was very popular in the Social Sciences.
It was very interesting to teach programming to non-tech very intelligent people. Some of them came up with really cool simulation ideas. I loved that part of my career.
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.
My first ever english word that I can spell out is REPEAT.
I had played with Logo on Apple IIe's in the US, and thought it made sense that in a French-speaking region[0] they'd have a French version. I relearned what little I already knew, but regrettably, this did not help greatly with my French skills.
All I remember from this is that `hazard' was the random built-in. Dunno why that's stuck, but there's probably some more important bit of information that should be in my brain if that weren't.
[0] Yeah, yeah, I know French, Flemish, and German are the official languages. I was in a French-speaking part.
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.
At the end of that exercise, the accumulated commands would be taken to the computer (in another part of the school) and entered into the computer, and eventually we'd get a plotter printout showing the results.
Those early days of computing feel like we were like being on another planet.
Very important book.
I... participed in the competition, but that's all.
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...
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.
[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...
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.
It was like a little futuristic tank. I searched for a minute, and I cannot find the exact model. Did I imagine this?
One later variant is the Valiant Roamer https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/30545/Valiant-Roamer...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak
Doesn't have a pen, but maybe it was a modified version of that toy?
It seems my pen memory came from a different logo-driven bot. In-fact, the Big Trak was not even Logo-driven, but had a similar command system.
I appear to have combined childhood recollections, but that was the shape I was "remembering." No wonder, just look at that thing! lol
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.
> Don't know how to HIDE
:(
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
70 comments here and they're basically all positive about Logo being formative
It's been all downhill since.
Came for the graphics, stayed for the recursion and string handling
310 versions!! https://pavel.it.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/logotree/pdf/LogoTree.pdf
How come no one makes dialects of PHP?? :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language)
The language is still alive but I think Scratch has mostly taken its place.
The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.
Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.
Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".
After a while I was running laps around my teachers and I knew computers were for me.
https://www.netlogo.org/
TThe only reason we got to learn it at all was because one of the daycare workers was a graduate student at the University of Washington. She somehow got permission for any of the kids who were interested to use the school's computer lab. Which, I think, took some doing on her part.
Back then, computers were treated like sacred objects. They made a huge deal about kids using them. The whole first week of the class was basically some grumpy old guy with a white beard telling us, "These are not toys! These are expensive machines!"
We had to wash our hands before we were allowed into the computer room. The old guy would literally "hand check" us at the door. You had to hold out your hands and show him that they were clean before you were allowed anywhere near the computers.
Logo was a lot of fun. We had a competition to see who could draw the coolest thing. Just like foundation for a "hackathon" really. Every day, "OK, Kids, you have 30 minutes, let's see what you can do!" Was a lot of fun.
I had to ask my mom for a floppy disk. "Mom, I need $5 for class supplies..." And then I had to explain that it was for a computer disk... and she had to call the school to make sure I was getting the right thing... even though I told her 100 times that I needed an un-formatted 5.25" disk! Ha.
Anyway good memories here. Logo and HyperCard were gateway drugs.
There's a whole Lispy beauty behind the language that teachers didn't know how to transmit to the kids because they themselves didn't understand it. The emphasis on turtle graphics was limiting.
https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=96...