10 ms·

History of Logo

114 points by lelf 6y ago

pgtan 6y ago
Logo rules big times!
- crznthndr 6y ago
  Even in 2020, I was pleasantly surprised that my kids school teaches Logo at the elementary school level! However, I had a hard time convincing parents who were suggesting it to be replaced with Python or a more modern programming language :(
  - new2628 6y ago
    There's some merit to both sides. As a kid in the eighties, I remember being annoyed by Logo -- it seemed a toy, and even as I child I wanted to learn the tools with which "real programs" (mostly games) could be written.
    - pgtan 6y ago
      Berkeley Logo has higher order mapping functions like "cascade" and "crossmap" which I miss in modern Emacs Lisp with its countless packages for example. If you want something more fancier, NetLogo provides agent based parallelism which is more suitable for games. The only thing I miss in (Berkeley) Logo is a better fill function.
      - bharvey 6y ago
        > The only thing I miss in (Berkeley) Logo is a better fill function. Thanks for volunteering! :) The code's at https://github.com/jrincayc/ucblogo-code https://github.com/jrincayc/ucblogo-code
    - DonHopkins 6y ago
      Snap! has the full power of Scheme (first class functions, user defined blocks, recursion, closures, continuations, JavaScript integration, etc), with a visual block syntax and playful graphical environment with turtle graphics like Scratch. The following post is a couple years old, but maybe somebody can provide some updates and recent info! Edit: I should have RTFA first, which is totally up to date, just published in 2020, from the turtle's mouth: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 >Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch >In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teachingStructure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403 DonHopkins on July 23, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Ask HN: Best Lego Mindstorms alternative for fun p... One of the coolest ways to learn programming I've ever seen is the Snap! visual programming language, which is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems. Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc). Y Combinator demo: https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Username=jens&ProjectName=y%20combinator https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Usern... Here's an excellent mind-blowing example by Ken Kahn of what's possible: teaching kids AI programming by integrating Snap! with existing JavaScript libraries and cloud services like AI, machine learning, speech synthesis and recognition, Arduino programming, etc: AI extensions of Snap! for the eCraft2Learn project https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/ https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/ >The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project. https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-services-integrated-with-snap-at-the-connective-ubiquitous-technology-for-embodiments-center-of-the-national-university-of-singapore-and-keio-university-on-16-march-2017-by-k/ http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-ser... Use devices with Snap!: Orbotix Sphero guide by Connor Hudson and Dan Garcia: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjIlFQjnGewM21A0vmjtFw/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjI... Lego NXT package by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/snap-nxt https://github.com/technoboy10/snap-nxt Nintendo Wiimote package by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap Finch and Hummingbird robots package by Tom Lauwers: https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap-programming/ https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap-programming/ Parallax S2 robot package by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/blockext/s2 https://github.com/blockext/s2 LEAP Motion by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion Speech synthesis by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech Arduino package by Alan Yorinks: https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm Arduino package by Bernat Romagosa/Citilab: http://snap4arduino.rocks/ http://snap4arduino.rocks/ Fischertechnik ROBOTICS TXT Controller by Richard Kunze: https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo-snap https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo-snap Snap! for Raspberry Pi by rasplay.org: http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/ http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/ More Snap! extensions for CS education: snap-apps.org provides Edgy for graphs, Cellular for multi-agent simulation, and more. http://snap-apps.org/ http://snap-apps.org/ http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html http://www.flipt.org/#cellular http://www.flipt.org/#cellular Netsblox for multiplayer networking. https://netsblox.org/ https://netsblox.org/
  - pgtan 6y ago
    You lucky! My kid's school teaches Delphi/TurboPascal (8. grade, first programming language course), which they replaced with Lazarus unable to install Delphi on modern PCs.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      On one hand, Lazarus and Free Pascal are great so it is nice to see it being used as an introduction to programming. On the other hand... Lazarus is way too complicated for someone's first foray into programming, IMO. The IDE throws at you a barrage of windows, buttons, lists, etc that can be almost as overwhelming as an airplane's cockpit :-P. I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE (outside of looking weird to anyone who didn't grew up with Turbo Pascal, almost no terminal/console works reliably enough for it and even in cases where it works, the IDE itself is very buggy - especially in the recent versions) and develop a simple GUI-based one akin to Turbo Pascal for Windows (ie. something that focuses only on small-sized programs) and have Lazarus as the "next step". Hell, it could even be based on Lazarus since most of its functionality is in the form of reusable components.
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        > I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE Why not fix the bugs instead? And it shouldn't look weird to anyone who has used TUI programs. In fact, we really should have support for these TUI features (stackable text windows, mouse-controlled menubar and widgets, context-sensitive status-bar) right inside emacs, or some other generic editor. They have stood the test of time wrt. intuitiveness and ergonomics, and it's weird that we still lack them in terminal-like environments.
        badsectoracula 6y ago
        For the other reasons besides the bugs. I have used the text mode IDE a lot to write smaller programs and it is always a PITA (just not enough of a PITA to open Lazarus, create a brand new project, etc). And some of that is outside FP's control, like Linux terminal emulators being universally broken when it comes to complex shortcut keys that involve function keys and modifiers. Add to that the the Windows console window now also tries to behave more like a Linux terminal (though even before you still had to manually modify the shortcut to not create a 200 line buffer or whatever that causes the IDE to try and use all those lines as its 'screen' - which is especially annoying when it also decides to display a dialog, which is centered at that 'screen' and you have to scroll to see it, usually after pressing a few keys like Alt+F to open the menu and noticing that nothing happens) and you get even more issues. Honestly the only environments where the FP seems to work (outside other bugs not related to the UI) is DOS and Linux's own console/terminal when running by itself without a window system. In any case i submitted that message too quickly, that "either" part should have been followed with the alternative to keep it around as a fallback for the platforms where a GUI isn't available or in case someone wants it (though considering how broken it is, i doubt anyone is actually seriously using it).
mimixco 6y ago
LOGO changed my life! When I learned it as a kid, it made me realize that software was "castles in the sky" and you could do anything you want. 41 years later and a career programmer, I'm now using Lisp in our most modern product. :-) I'll always be grateful to Papert for his work in creating and teaching LOGO.
- kjs3 6y ago
  You aren't the only person I've met who can draw a line from Logo through Lisp to a successful career.
- klotz 6y ago
  Which version of Logo and which Lisp? Have you read SICP? Hal Abelson is responsible for getting Logo out of MIT and into the world of the Apple II, and with GJS for SICP. Logo and Lisp connections go way back though, to it's inception with BBN and MIT people.
  - mimixco 6y ago
    As a kid, the library had a TI-99/4A with its LOGO and a book by Papert included. I remember it had the most documentation of any piece of software for the machine, which intrigued me. They also had a Coleco ADAM that had LOGO, too, so I used both. Today, we use SBCL to power a Lisp backend for our product that communicates with an Electron HTML/JS frontend via WebSockets. (See Nebula[0]) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043417
kilbuz 6y ago
When I was in elementary school in the 80s, someone in our district retrofit a school bus with two rows of computers running along the sides. The bus would travel to each school in the district once a month or so. We would all walk out to the parking lot, board the bus, and use Logo. It was probably the first exposure to a computer most of the kids in my class had, and I have never forgotten it.
- onemoresoop 6y ago
  Wow, that was cool. My first exposure to programing was also logo, back in the 80s, back in eastern europe. It was in the form of an afterschool program my father found out about. I loved it. Then when first dabbling in basic my first instinct was to try to draw with it. I think theres something inherently good about computer drawing that attracts kids to computers at early ages, before they are capable of developing interest for abstract ideas and problem solving. For older kids who want to learn programming I definitely recommend starting with Racket. It comes with cool libraries and small games can be built very creatively. Plus a lot more.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  A Logomobile! https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Bus-Window-Sticker-Decal/dp/B013F0JQYM https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Bus-Window-Sticker-Decal/dp/B0... Could they program the computers inside the bus to drive it around, like Robot Odyssey? ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-hardest-computer-game-of-all-time.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-harde... https://www.robotodyssey.online/ https://www.robotodyssey.online/ I suppose there could be a downside to that: https://www.vaildaily.com/news/photos-turtle-bus-rescued-by-crane/ https://www.vaildaily.com/news/photos-turtle-bus-rescued-by-...
chrisdone 6y ago
There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.
- markdeloura 6y ago
  Thanks for the link! It's a great discussion to have and should be a topic for all learning, not just CS Ed. If you look at the K-12 CS Ed standards defined at the state level, you'll find a generally coherent approach to staged learning of CS, both in terms of computational thinking structure (teach sequential behavior before conditional behavior) and language complexity (Scratch first, Java later). It's also worth considering playful or project-based approaches vs rigorous curricula-based learning... we're lucky to start with playfulness in CS because of the history of Logo. But what about for example, aeronautics? You might really enjoy learning to build and fly a rocket in Kerbal Space Program, but at some point you might yearn for more and benefit from a deep dive into some scaffolded traditional curricula. Then you can come back to Kerbal and apply what you learned, etc etc. Perhaps there's some sort of optimal cadence, different for each person and their interests. What's the analog for CS Ed?
- rzzzt 6y ago
  OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw
  - kjs3 6y ago
ken 6y ago
Logo was a hard pill to swallow in the 1980's. It had some neat features 'on paper' but it was hard to appreciate them because it was agonizingly slow on the computers of the day. It was the first programming experience I ever had where I'd type in my function, and then had to wait a while for the computer to do something to it (it never used the word "compiler"), and then it could run. I remember thinking: this makes programming not-fun. I could write it in assembler faster than I'm waiting for the "...." to dance across the screen.
- TheBlight 6y ago
  I never really thought of LOGO as a programming language as a kid. It just seemed like a game to me. I also had no concept of anything with a computer being fast or slow so its speed seemed normal.
  - ken 6y ago
    That's an interesting connection. Logo claimed to be "interactive" but staring at a compilation log go by for 30 or 60 (or more) seconds really pushed the limits of what one might consider "interactive". Whereas, "Robot Odyssey" was an actual game, and it was a terrific way to get me even more interested in programming. You never had to just sit and wait on it -- or maybe you did but they disguised it so well with animation or loading screens or whatever that I never noticed.
    - TheBlight 6y ago
      I don't remember the details but I remember some of the kids who were good at math would get to go to the computer room sometimes and instead of math class and we'd make LOGO programs or do other stuff on Commodore PETs. Just seemed like fun. We each had to bring our own disk with our name on it. This was like 2nd and 3rd grade.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Reminds me of a comic I saw in an old Apple ][ magazine: (One kid talking to another, with dad in the background hunched over an Apple ][.) "Daddy's playing Pascal. That's where you try and see how many dots you can get before it beeps and you say nasty words."
DonHopkins 6y ago
Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp Lars Brinkhoff got some of this code to run in MacLisp on an emulator! (I don't know how much of the historical hardware the emulator supports yet, but he's probably worked on some of that too. ;) ) https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620 Thanks to Lars, here are two revisions of an AI Lab memo about LLOGO: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf And a Logo manual and glossary of PDP-11 Logo: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315a.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315a.pdf
- larsbrinkhoff 6y ago
  Also running on the emulator: PDP-10 Logo, PDP-11 Logo, Applle II Logo. The emulator doesn't support the robot arm yet.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    I have nightmares about that! ;) https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacing.gif https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacin...
    - larsbrinkhoff 6y ago
      Say, are you handy with lego?
      - 6y ago
DonHopkins 6y ago
Lars Brinkhoff suggests that this thread comp.lang.logo with Brian Harvey and Leigh Klotz is required reading: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvEkZsJEQ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvE... Just a couple highlights from a detailed history of Logo that Brian and Leigh and others posted: >From Brian Harvey: >Many, many people have been involved in the development of Logo. >Wally Feurzeig started the whole thing by organizing a group at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc., to study the educational effects of teaching kids a programming language. The first language they used, like most programming languages, was focused on numeric computation, and it was Wally's idea that kids would find it more natural to work in an area they knew better, namely natural language; therefore, he set up a team to design a language featuring words and sentences. Wally made up the name "Logo." >The team Wally put together at BBN included Seymour Papert and Dan Bobrow. The three of them are credited as the designers of the first version of the language; Dan wrote the first implementation. In a BBN report dated August, 1967, credit for additional work is given to Richard Grant, Cynthia Solomon, and Frank Frazier. >Seymour later started a Logo group at MIT, where Logo development continued. The MIT versions of Logo were substantially different from the BBN ones, both in the notations used and in the things the language could do. Most notably, turtle graphics was added at MIT. >Among the many people who contributed to the development of Logo at MIT, at the risk of leaving someone out, are Hal Abelson, Paul Goldenberg, Dan Watt, Gary Drescher, Steve Hain, Leigh Klotz, Andy diSessa, Brian Silverman... oh, lots of people. >I think that most of the early documents are out of print now, but whatever documentation there is of the early efforts will be in the form of technical reports from BBN and from MIT. You may have to visit Cambridge to find them! >From Leight Klotz: >In the mid 1970's, when the AI Lab Lisp Machine project was just getting underway, Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis (later to found Terrapin, and still later, Thinking Machines) put together a project to build a Logo machine. It had two components: a PDP-11 processor (the 3500) and a separate vector-graphics display (the 2500). Guy Montpetit, a Canadian entrepeneur, funded development eventually, and a company called General Turtle was formed. General Turtle built and sold the 2500/3500 system. Henry Minsky, then about 12, worked on the design of the 2500, using the Stanford Draw program, one of the early electronics CAD systems. (The 2500 had this really great barrell shifter stolen from the Lisp machine design, but it was later found not to work, so it was never used.) [...] >[...] Like Brian, I've left out many people who worked on Logo over the years: Brian Fox and Flavio Rose worked for me at Terrapin on a contract basis briefly, as did vagabond programmer Devon McCullough (who used to dial in with a 300 baud modem he'd written in entirely software using the parallel game port, with an 80-column mixed-case display done with 3x5 pixel characters; when the modem detected the call waiting click on the line, it would make the Apple II speaker make the telephone ringing sound -- a feature which I just saw a US patent filed on, not by Devon.), and the frustrated Sinclar QX programmer, who I suspect doesn't want his name used. Of course, there were tons more people at the AI Lab in the pre-commercial days... >From Lars Brinkhoff >Hello, >I'm mostly researching PDP-10 software, especially MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System. >I have recently stumbled across some of the LOGO group work. I have a copy of the Dazzle Dart game that ran on their PDP-11/45. It uses the Tom Knight vector display controller, so it's not easy to run it. >Maybe it would be possible to get the original MIT PDP-11 LOGO running. >[...] It's running now. >[...] Now also BBN PDP-10 Logo, MIT CLOGO, MIT Lisp Logo, and hopefully soon MIT Apple II Logo (direct ancestor of Terrapin Apple II Logo).
DonHopkins 6y ago
Also thanks to Lars Brinkhoff's research: Here's a video uploaded by Cynthia Solomon. Seems legit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ Definitely check out the rest of Cynthia Solomon's youtube video treasure trove, with lots of great stuff by Marvin and Margaret Minsky, Seymour Papert, and others from MIT and Atari Cambridge Research: https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos Seymour Papert on Logo, Turtles and Giraffes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM A gestural programming system developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M Marvin Minsky demonstrating a Logo Machine with an acoustic modem and cassette tape, talking about education theory, and showing a part of his first "thinking" machine: a simulated nerve synapse (1 of 40) with an adjustable knob that he built in 1951 out of WW-II surplus hardware, and discussing playing with Tinker Toys as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 David Levitt demonstrating his musical improvisation software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys
DonHopkins 6y ago
Seymour Papert, introducing "The Turtle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs
- lydzb123 6y ago
  Ah, Thanks for linking these vids! I loved playing with turtle geometry back in elementary school. Brings back happy memories :D
- mimixco 6y ago
  Just that first video alone introduces and explains several key programming concepts: imperative programming with its hidden state and implicit instruction order, procedure calls with parameters, and operator-operand syntax -- all without ever having brought up any of that.
manaskarekar 6y ago
My first exposure to computers was through Logo in 1992! Thinking back, it was really effective in grabbing your attention and making you want to experiment with different commands! This is a good reminder that Logo is still a great teaching tool, especially for kids. I suppose python + turtle can replicate the effect to some degree as well. https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html
soperj 6y ago
Logo was definitely my introduction to programming. Never thought of it as programming. Lots of fun. We tried to make an animation with it as a kid.
lou1306 6y ago
One of Logo's derivatives, NetLogo [1], seems to be pretty popular among academics as an agent-based modeling tool. It also has a neat browser interpreter. Worth a look, IMO. [1]: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
- _reza 6y ago
  Santafe institute's 'Introduction to Complexity' online course uses NetLogo to run simulations.
- mestelan 6y ago
  Their Twitter thread (to be found on the front page) recently announces a block-based interface, similar to Scratch, Snap... Example here: https://t.co/aZKscZAHCS https://t.co/aZKscZAHCS I am honestly wondering which of these alternatives I should start from, to introduce my 8 and 11 yo to programming. Maybe start obvious (so... Scratch, which is used at their school), then introduce the others as needed?
nicetryguy 6y ago
Aaaand once again Gary Kildall gets left out of history. While CEO of Digital Research, the largest software company in the world at the time (besides IBM), he did an entire implementation himself! DR Logo had some innovative graphical features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4P6MDuk3Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4P6MDuk3Zk
- klotz 6y ago
  Gary Killdall tried to buy Terrapin. It was unfavorable terms and I didn't agree. He went away mad and wrote something in C an implementation of what looked like Logo but I don't know how he choose to implement it. I remember him talking about structs of various sorts at one point, instead of using lists so I assume he was concerned about efficiency. I never had a discussion with them about their interest in pedagogy so I can't comment.
catketch 6y ago
This was an interesting read. I grew up with early personal computers of the eighties and in the geographic area described in the history, so a lot of it is nostalgic. At that time, programming on early home computers generally meant using BASIC (and maybe poke’ing some assembly code) before getting into “real” languages like pascal, Fortran and c in college. I remember thinking logo was a ‘baby’ language and only for kids—-it wasn’t until later on I appreciated some of its features and it’s ties to lisp. Programming languages like REBOL (or the modern variant Red http://www.red-Lang.org http://www.red-Lang.org) seem to build on many of the same ideas.
- timbit42 6y ago
  Yes, REBOL was created by Carl Sassenrath, a fan of Lisp, who after writing much of the Amiga operating system, wrote Amiga Logo and then REBOL.
jecel 6y ago
In 1983 I and Fabio Cunha designed a Logo computer with the 6809 processor: http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/pegasus.html http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/pegasus.html The project evolved into a more advanced 68000 based Smalltalk computer, but I regretted not finishing and releasing the original machine as years later I saw what schools in Brazil were doing with MSX Logo and such. The big mistake in the design was using the same chipset as the TRS-80 Color Computer which had a bunch of needless text and low resolution modes but no nice high resolutions ones.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Off topic: This site has a very nice UI. No frills. Almost soothing. Now i have to read that, and the rest of the site has moved to the top of my Tsundoku stack because of that. Does anybody else feel like that, too?
- tingletech 6y ago
  Thanks! My group at work produces that site [0], and our design group [1] worked on the UI too. [0] https://cdlib.org/services/pad/ https://cdlib.org/services/pad/ [1] https://cdlib.org/services/uxdesign/ https://cdlib.org/services/uxdesign/
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    I really like it. It is so unobtrusive. At first i've been surprised because i disabled in-browser Pdf-reading, but it almost looked like a pdf-reader. All proportioned and positioned just right, no fiddling necessary. And not laggy either. This is how it should be! (For me.)
    - tingletech 6y ago
      it is a pdf reader, our own fork of PDF.js https://github.com/eScholarship/pdfjs-embed2 https://github.com/eScholarship/pdfjs-embed2
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        I wondered about that, since the original document obviously was a pdf. Anyways, doesn't matter because your fork did the right thing for me on 24" @1920x1200, while i've been up for about 7 hours, reading and beginning to feel a little tired. When i came across your's it eased me into focus. Again: This is how it should be!
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        edit: i should add i know both the internal ones of Firefox, and Chromium. They usually don't work for me, that is why i disabled them, apart from the usual cargo-culting paranoia to only open documents with native applications ;)
__david__ 6y ago
I couldn't stand Logo as a child--my entire childhood goal was to make a video game and Logo was just so slow. Turtle graphics made certain things easy (drawing circles) but there was no way to get some animated sprites on the screen. I pretty much instantly recognized this and stubbornly decided it was toy language for babies. It wasn't until years later that I realized that Logo had a bunch of neat fundamentals (like functions, which were totally foreign to BASIC-fluent me). It's a shame it wasn't more attractive to a kid like me.
DonHopkins 6y ago
Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64 came with a 6502 assembler written in Logo by Leigh Klotz, that they used to write Logo primitives (for controlling the turtle, etc). It would be ambitious to make a self hosting 6502 Logo meta assembler, by porting the entire 6502 assembly language Logo source code to the 6502 Logo Assembler! Leigh, wasn't the assembler that you used for the original Apple ][ version of Logo written in MacLisp running on a PDP-10? The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found (adafruit.com) 379 points by mmastrac on Oct 4, 2018 | hide | past | web | favorite | 89 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142287 https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/04/the-apple-ii-source-code-for-the-logo-language-found/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/04/the-apple-ii-source-cod... Lars: The link in the article to the code from https://github.com/PDP-10/its https://github.com/PDP-10/its is broken. I found a few references to it in the repo. Did you have to take it down, or did you move it somewhere else? https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/a5694acbf9b6185a36d18d22631914ac40605d6b/doc/logo.md https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/a5694acbf9b6185a36d18d226... >Logo >"I too see the computer presence as a potent influence on the human mind. I am very much aware of the holding power of an interactive computer and of how taking the computer as a model can influence the way we think about ourselves. In fact the work on LOGO to which I have devoted much of the past years consists precisely of developing such forces in positive directions." >Seymour Papert >"Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and for a continually evolving family of computer languages that aid its realization." >Harold Abelson >"Historically, this idea that Logo is mainly turtle graphics is a mistake. Logo’s name comes from the Greek word for word, because Logo was first designed as a language in which to manipulate language: words and sentences." >Brian Harvey >Logo was initially created by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Daniel G.Bobrow, Cynthia Solomon and Richard Grant in 1967 as part of a National Science Foundation sponsored research project conducted at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1969 Dr. Seymour Papert started the Logo Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Throughout the 1970s the majority of Logo development was conducted at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Division for Study and Research in Education, using large research computer systems, such as ITS powered PDP-10. >Our goal is to make that early Logo systems available to a wider audience of enthusiasts for exploration, experimenting and, of course, hacking. [...] >MIT APLOGO >In accordance with Leigh L Klotz Jr., Hal Abelson directed the Logo for the Apple II project at MIT. >MIT APLOGO was developed by Stephen Hain, Patrick G. Sobalvarro and Leigh L Klotz Jr. It was developed and cross-compilled for the Apple-II-Plus Personal Microcomputer on PDP-10 at the MIT LOGO Group. It is direct predecessor for Terrapin Logo. We have a source code for assembling an improved version from 7/9/81 at its/src/aplogo
AstroJetson 6y ago
I love Logo. On of the best program was TLC Logo ( The Lisp Company 1983). They had added some extensions that made it even more powerful. The Book, Thininking about TLC logo with the Turtle cartoons (by Allen, Burke, Johnson) was super easy to learn. It's a shame it never made it to the PC stage.

History of Logo

114 points by lelf 6y ago

pgtan 6y ago

Logo rules big times!

crznthndr 6y ago
Even in 2020, I was pleasantly surprised that my kids school teaches Logo at the elementary school level! However, I had a hard time convincing parents who were suggesting it to be replaced with Python or a more modern programming language :(
- new2628 6y ago
  There's some merit to both sides. As a kid in the eighties, I remember being annoyed by Logo -- it seemed a toy, and even as I child I wanted to learn the tools with which "real programs" (mostly games) could be written.
  - pgtan 6y ago
    Berkeley Logo has higher order mapping functions like "cascade" and "crossmap" which I miss in modern Emacs Lisp with its countless packages for example. If you want something more fancier, NetLogo provides agent based parallelism which is more suitable for games. The only thing I miss in (Berkeley) Logo is a better fill function.
    - bharvey 6y ago
      > The only thing I miss in (Berkeley) Logo is a better fill function. Thanks for volunteering! :) The code's at https://github.com/jrincayc/ucblogo-code https://github.com/jrincayc/ucblogo-code
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    Snap! has the full power of Scheme (first class functions, user defined blocks, recursion, closures, continuations, JavaScript integration, etc), with a visual block syntax and playful graphical environment with turtle graphics like Scratch. The following post is a couple years old, but maybe somebody can provide some updates and recent info! Edit: I should have RTFA first, which is totally up to date, just published in 2020, from the turtle's mouth: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 >Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch >In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teachingStructure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403 DonHopkins on July 23, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Ask HN: Best Lego Mindstorms alternative for fun p... One of the coolest ways to learn programming I've ever seen is the Snap! visual programming language, which is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems. Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc). Y Combinator demo: https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Username=jens&ProjectName=y%20combinator https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Usern... Here's an excellent mind-blowing example by Ken Kahn of what's possible: teaching kids AI programming by integrating Snap! with existing JavaScript libraries and cloud services like AI, machine learning, speech synthesis and recognition, Arduino programming, etc: AI extensions of Snap! for the eCraft2Learn project https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/ https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/ >The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project. https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-services-integrated-with-snap-at-the-connective-ubiquitous-technology-for-embodiments-center-of-the-national-university-of-singapore-and-keio-university-on-16-march-2017-by-k/ http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-ser... Use devices with Snap!: Orbotix Sphero guide by Connor Hudson and Dan Garcia: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjIlFQjnGewM21A0vmjtFw/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjI... Lego NXT package by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/snap-nxt https://github.com/technoboy10/snap-nxt Nintendo Wiimote package by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap Finch and Hummingbird robots package by Tom Lauwers: https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap-programming/ https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap-programming/ Parallax S2 robot package by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/blockext/s2 https://github.com/blockext/s2 LEAP Motion by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion Speech synthesis by Connor Hudson: https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech Arduino package by Alan Yorinks: https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm Arduino package by Bernat Romagosa/Citilab: http://snap4arduino.rocks/ http://snap4arduino.rocks/ Fischertechnik ROBOTICS TXT Controller by Richard Kunze: https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo-snap https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo-snap Snap! for Raspberry Pi by rasplay.org: http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/ http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/ More Snap! extensions for CS education: snap-apps.org provides Edgy for graphs, Cellular for multi-agent simulation, and more. http://snap-apps.org/ http://snap-apps.org/ http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html http://www.flipt.org/#cellular http://www.flipt.org/#cellular Netsblox for multiplayer networking. https://netsblox.org/ https://netsblox.org/
- pgtan 6y ago
  You lucky! My kid's school teaches Delphi/TurboPascal (8. grade, first programming language course), which they replaced with Lazarus unable to install Delphi on modern PCs.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    On one hand, Lazarus and Free Pascal are great so it is nice to see it being used as an introduction to programming. On the other hand... Lazarus is way too complicated for someone's first foray into programming, IMO. The IDE throws at you a barrage of windows, buttons, lists, etc that can be almost as overwhelming as an airplane's cockpit :-P. I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE (outside of looking weird to anyone who didn't grew up with Turbo Pascal, almost no terminal/console works reliably enough for it and even in cases where it works, the IDE itself is very buggy - especially in the recent versions) and develop a simple GUI-based one akin to Turbo Pascal for Windows (ie. something that focuses only on small-sized programs) and have Lazarus as the "next step". Hell, it could even be based on Lazarus since most of its functionality is in the form of reusable components.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      > I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE Why not fix the bugs instead? And it shouldn't look weird to anyone who has used TUI programs. In fact, we really should have support for these TUI features (stackable text windows, mouse-controlled menubar and widgets, context-sensitive status-bar) right inside emacs, or some other generic editor. They have stood the test of time wrt. intuitiveness and ergonomics, and it's weird that we still lack them in terminal-like environments.
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        For the other reasons besides the bugs. I have used the text mode IDE a lot to write smaller programs and it is always a PITA (just not enough of a PITA to open Lazarus, create a brand new project, etc). And some of that is outside FP's control, like Linux terminal emulators being universally broken when it comes to complex shortcut keys that involve function keys and modifiers. Add to that the the Windows console window now also tries to behave more like a Linux terminal (though even before you still had to manually modify the shortcut to not create a 200 line buffer or whatever that causes the IDE to try and use all those lines as its 'screen' - which is especially annoying when it also decides to display a dialog, which is centered at that 'screen' and you have to scroll to see it, usually after pressing a few keys like Alt+F to open the menu and noticing that nothing happens) and you get even more issues. Honestly the only environments where the FP seems to work (outside other bugs not related to the UI) is DOS and Linux's own console/terminal when running by itself without a window system. In any case i submitted that message too quickly, that "either" part should have been followed with the alternative to keep it around as a fallback for the platforms where a GUI isn't available or in case someone wants it (though considering how broken it is, i doubt anyone is actually seriously using it).

mimixco 6y ago

LOGO changed my life! When I learned it as a kid, it made me realize that software was "castles in the sky" and you could do anything you want. 41 years later and a career programmer, I'm now using Lisp in our most modern product. :-) I'll always be grateful to Papert for his work in creating and teaching LOGO.

kjs3 6y ago
You aren't the only person I've met who can draw a line from Logo through Lisp to a successful career.
klotz 6y ago
Which version of Logo and which Lisp? Have you read SICP? Hal Abelson is responsible for getting Logo out of MIT and into the world of the Apple II, and with GJS for SICP. Logo and Lisp connections go way back though, to it's inception with BBN and MIT people.
- mimixco 6y ago
  As a kid, the library had a TI-99/4A with its LOGO and a book by Papert included. I remember it had the most documentation of any piece of software for the machine, which intrigued me. They also had a Coleco ADAM that had LOGO, too, so I used both. Today, we use SBCL to power a Lisp backend for our product that communicates with an Electron HTML/JS frontend via WebSockets. (See Nebula[0]) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043417

kilbuz 6y ago

When I was in elementary school in the 80s, someone in our district retrofit a school bus with two rows of computers running along the sides. The bus would travel to each school in the district once a month or so. We would all walk out to the parking lot, board the bus, and use Logo. It was probably the first exposure to a computer most of the kids in my class had, and I have never forgotten it.

onemoresoop 6y ago
Wow, that was cool. My first exposure to programing was also logo, back in the 80s, back in eastern europe. It was in the form of an afterschool program my father found out about. I loved it. Then when first dabbling in basic my first instinct was to try to draw with it. I think theres something inherently good about computer drawing that attracts kids to computers at early ages, before they are capable of developing interest for abstract ideas and problem solving. For older kids who want to learn programming I definitely recommend starting with Racket. It comes with cool libraries and small games can be built very creatively. Plus a lot more.
DonHopkins 6y ago
A Logomobile! https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Bus-Window-Sticker-Decal/dp/B013F0JQYM https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Bus-Window-Sticker-Decal/dp/B0... Could they program the computers inside the bus to drive it around, like Robot Odyssey? ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-hardest-computer-game-of-all-time.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-harde... https://www.robotodyssey.online/ https://www.robotodyssey.online/ I suppose there could be a downside to that: https://www.vaildaily.com/news/photos-turtle-bus-rescued-by-crane/ https://www.vaildaily.com/news/photos-turtle-bus-rescued-by-...

chrisdone 6y ago

There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.

markdeloura 6y ago
Thanks for the link! It's a great discussion to have and should be a topic for all learning, not just CS Ed. If you look at the K-12 CS Ed standards defined at the state level, you'll find a generally coherent approach to staged learning of CS, both in terms of computational thinking structure (teach sequential behavior before conditional behavior) and language complexity (Scratch first, Java later). It's also worth considering playful or project-based approaches vs rigorous curricula-based learning... we're lucky to start with playfulness in CS because of the history of Logo. But what about for example, aeronautics? You might really enjoy learning to build and fly a rocket in Kerbal Space Program, but at some point you might yearn for more and benefit from a deep dive into some scaffolded traditional curricula. Then you can come back to Kerbal and apply what you learned, etc etc. Perhaps there's some sort of optimal cadence, different for each person and their interests. What's the analog for CS Ed?
rzzzt 6y ago
OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw
- kjs3 6y ago

ken 6y ago

Logo was a hard pill to swallow in the 1980's. It had some neat features 'on paper' but it was hard to appreciate them because it was agonizingly slow on the computers of the day. It was the first programming experience I ever had where I'd type in my function, and then had to wait a while for the computer to do something to it (it never used the word "compiler"), and then it could run. I remember thinking: this makes programming not-fun. I could write it in assembler faster than I'm waiting for the "...." to dance across the screen.

TheBlight 6y ago
I never really thought of LOGO as a programming language as a kid. It just seemed like a game to me. I also had no concept of anything with a computer being fast or slow so its speed seemed normal.
- ken 6y ago
  That's an interesting connection. Logo claimed to be "interactive" but staring at a compilation log go by for 30 or 60 (or more) seconds really pushed the limits of what one might consider "interactive". Whereas, "Robot Odyssey" was an actual game, and it was a terrific way to get me even more interested in programming. You never had to just sit and wait on it -- or maybe you did but they disguised it so well with animation or loading screens or whatever that I never noticed.
  - TheBlight 6y ago
    I don't remember the details but I remember some of the kids who were good at math would get to go to the computer room sometimes and instead of math class and we'd make LOGO programs or do other stuff on Commodore PETs. Just seemed like fun. We each had to bring our own disk with our name on it. This was like 2nd and 3rd grade.
DonHopkins 6y ago
Reminds me of a comic I saw in an old Apple ][ magazine: (One kid talking to another, with dad in the background hunched over an Apple ][.) "Daddy's playing Pascal. That's where you try and see how many dots you can get before it beeps and you say nasty words."

DonHopkins 6y ago

Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp Lars Brinkhoff got some of this code to run in MacLisp on an emulator! (I don't know how much of the historical hardware the emulator supports yet, but he's probably worked on some of that too. ;) ) https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620 Thanks to Lars, here are two revisions of an AI Lab memo about LLOGO: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf And a Logo manual and glossary of PDP-11 Logo: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315a.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315a.pdf

larsbrinkhoff 6y ago
Also running on the emulator: PDP-10 Logo, PDP-11 Logo, Applle II Logo. The emulator doesn't support the robot arm yet.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  I have nightmares about that! ;) https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacing.gif https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacin...
  - larsbrinkhoff 6y ago
    Say, are you handy with lego?
    - 6y ago

DonHopkins 6y ago

Lars Brinkhoff suggests that this thread comp.lang.logo with Brian Harvey and Leigh Klotz is required reading: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvEkZsJEQ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvE... Just a couple highlights from a detailed history of Logo that Brian and Leigh and others posted: >From Brian Harvey: >Many, many people have been involved in the development of Logo. >Wally Feurzeig started the whole thing by organizing a group at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc., to study the educational effects of teaching kids a programming language. The first language they used, like most programming languages, was focused on numeric computation, and it was Wally's idea that kids would find it more natural to work in an area they knew better, namely natural language; therefore, he set up a team to design a language featuring words and sentences. Wally made up the name "Logo." >The team Wally put together at BBN included Seymour Papert and Dan Bobrow. The three of them are credited as the designers of the first version of the language; Dan wrote the first implementation. In a BBN report dated August, 1967, credit for additional work is given to Richard Grant, Cynthia Solomon, and Frank Frazier. >Seymour later started a Logo group at MIT, where Logo development continued. The MIT versions of Logo were substantially different from the BBN ones, both in the notations used and in the things the language could do. Most notably, turtle graphics was added at MIT. >Among the many people who contributed to the development of Logo at MIT, at the risk of leaving someone out, are Hal Abelson, Paul Goldenberg, Dan Watt, Gary Drescher, Steve Hain, Leigh Klotz, Andy diSessa, Brian Silverman... oh, lots of people. >I think that most of the early documents are out of print now, but whatever documentation there is of the early efforts will be in the form of technical reports from BBN and from MIT. You may have to visit Cambridge to find them! >From Leight Klotz: >In the mid 1970's, when the AI Lab Lisp Machine project was just getting underway, Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis (later to found Terrapin, and still later, Thinking Machines) put together a project to build a Logo machine. It had two components: a PDP-11 processor (the 3500) and a separate vector-graphics display (the 2500). Guy Montpetit, a Canadian entrepeneur, funded development eventually, and a company called General Turtle was formed. General Turtle built and sold the 2500/3500 system. Henry Minsky, then about 12, worked on the design of the 2500, using the Stanford Draw program, one of the early electronics CAD systems. (The 2500 had this really great barrell shifter stolen from the Lisp machine design, but it was later found not to work, so it was never used.) [...] >[...] Like Brian, I've left out many people who worked on Logo over the years: Brian Fox and Flavio Rose worked for me at Terrapin on a contract basis briefly, as did vagabond programmer Devon McCullough (who used to dial in with a 300 baud modem he'd written in entirely software using the parallel game port, with an 80-column mixed-case display done with 3x5 pixel characters; when the modem detected the call waiting click on the line, it would make the Apple II speaker make the telephone ringing sound -- a feature which I just saw a US patent filed on, not by Devon.), and the frustrated Sinclar QX programmer, who I suspect doesn't want his name used. Of course, there were tons more people at the AI Lab in the pre-commercial days... >From Lars Brinkhoff >Hello, >I'm mostly researching PDP-10 software, especially MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System. >I have recently stumbled across some of the LOGO group work. I have a copy of the Dazzle Dart game that ran on their PDP-11/45. It uses the Tom Knight vector display controller, so it's not easy to run it. >Maybe it would be possible to get the original MIT PDP-11 LOGO running. >[...] It's running now. >[...] Now also BBN PDP-10 Logo, MIT CLOGO, MIT Lisp Logo, and hopefully soon MIT Apple II Logo (direct ancestor of Terrapin Apple II Logo).

DonHopkins 6y ago

Also thanks to Lars Brinkhoff's research: Here's a video uploaded by Cynthia Solomon. Seems legit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ Definitely check out the rest of Cynthia Solomon's youtube video treasure trove, with lots of great stuff by Marvin and Margaret Minsky, Seymour Papert, and others from MIT and Atari Cambridge Research: https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos Seymour Papert on Logo, Turtles and Giraffes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM A gestural programming system developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M Marvin Minsky demonstrating a Logo Machine with an acoustic modem and cassette tape, talking about education theory, and showing a part of his first "thinking" machine: a simulated nerve synapse (1 of 40) with an adjustable knob that he built in 1951 out of WW-II surplus hardware, and discussing playing with Tinker Toys as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 David Levitt demonstrating his musical improvisation software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys

DonHopkins 6y ago

Seymour Papert, introducing "The Turtle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs

lydzb123 6y ago
Ah, Thanks for linking these vids! I loved playing with turtle geometry back in elementary school. Brings back happy memories :D
mimixco 6y ago
Just that first video alone introduces and explains several key programming concepts: imperative programming with its hidden state and implicit instruction order, procedure calls with parameters, and operator-operand syntax -- all without ever having brought up any of that.

manaskarekar 6y ago

My first exposure to computers was through Logo in 1992! Thinking back, it was really effective in grabbing your attention and making you want to experiment with different commands! This is a good reminder that Logo is still a great teaching tool, especially for kids. I suppose python + turtle can replicate the effect to some degree as well. https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

soperj 6y ago

Logo was definitely my introduction to programming. Never thought of it as programming. Lots of fun. We tried to make an animation with it as a kid.

lou1306 6y ago

One of Logo's derivatives, NetLogo [1], seems to be pretty popular among academics as an agent-based modeling tool. It also has a neat browser interpreter. Worth a look, IMO. [1]: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

_reza 6y ago
Santafe institute's 'Introduction to Complexity' online course uses NetLogo to run simulations.
mestelan 6y ago
Their Twitter thread (to be found on the front page) recently announces a block-based interface, similar to Scratch, Snap... Example here: https://t.co/aZKscZAHCS https://t.co/aZKscZAHCS I am honestly wondering which of these alternatives I should start from, to introduce my 8 and 11 yo to programming. Maybe start obvious (so... Scratch, which is used at their school), then introduce the others as needed?

nicetryguy 6y ago

Aaaand once again Gary Kildall gets left out of history. While CEO of Digital Research, the largest software company in the world at the time (besides IBM), he did an entire implementation himself! DR Logo had some innovative graphical features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4P6MDuk3Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4P6MDuk3Zk

klotz 6y ago
Gary Killdall tried to buy Terrapin. It was unfavorable terms and I didn't agree. He went away mad and wrote something in C an implementation of what looked like Logo but I don't know how he choose to implement it. I remember him talking about structs of various sorts at one point, instead of using lists so I assume he was concerned about efficiency. I never had a discussion with them about their interest in pedagogy so I can't comment.

catketch 6y ago

This was an interesting read. I grew up with early personal computers of the eighties and in the geographic area described in the history, so a lot of it is nostalgic. At that time, programming on early home computers generally meant using BASIC (and maybe poke’ing some assembly code) before getting into “real” languages like pascal, Fortran and c in college. I remember thinking logo was a ‘baby’ language and only for kids—-it wasn’t until later on I appreciated some of its features and it’s ties to lisp. Programming languages like REBOL (or the modern variant Red http://www.red-Lang.org http://www.red-Lang.org) seem to build on many of the same ideas.

timbit42 6y ago
Yes, REBOL was created by Carl Sassenrath, a fan of Lisp, who after writing much of the Amiga operating system, wrote Amiga Logo and then REBOL.

jecel 6y ago

In 1983 I and Fabio Cunha designed a Logo computer with the 6809 processor: http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/pegasus.html http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/pegasus.html The project evolved into a more advanced 68000 based Smalltalk computer, but I regretted not finishing and releasing the original machine as years later I saw what schools in Brazil were doing with MSX Logo and such. The big mistake in the design was using the same chipset as the TRS-80 Color Computer which had a bunch of needless text and low resolution modes but no nice high resolutions ones.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Off topic: This site has a very nice UI. No frills. Almost soothing. Now i have to read that, and the rest of the site has moved to the top of my Tsundoku stack because of that. Does anybody else feel like that, too?

tingletech 6y ago
Thanks! My group at work produces that site [0], and our design group [1] worked on the UI too. [0] https://cdlib.org/services/pad/ https://cdlib.org/services/pad/ [1] https://cdlib.org/services/uxdesign/ https://cdlib.org/services/uxdesign/
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  I really like it. It is so unobtrusive. At first i've been surprised because i disabled in-browser Pdf-reading, but it almost looked like a pdf-reader. All proportioned and positioned just right, no fiddling necessary. And not laggy either. This is how it should be! (For me.)
  - tingletech 6y ago
    it is a pdf reader, our own fork of PDF.js https://github.com/eScholarship/pdfjs-embed2 https://github.com/eScholarship/pdfjs-embed2
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      I wondered about that, since the original document obviously was a pdf. Anyways, doesn't matter because your fork did the right thing for me on 24" @1920x1200, while i've been up for about 7 hours, reading and beginning to feel a little tired. When i came across your's it eased me into focus. Again: This is how it should be!
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        edit: i should add i know both the internal ones of Firefox, and Chromium. They usually don't work for me, that is why i disabled them, apart from the usual cargo-culting paranoia to only open documents with native applications ;)

__david__ 6y ago

I couldn't stand Logo as a child--my entire childhood goal was to make a video game and Logo was just so slow. Turtle graphics made certain things easy (drawing circles) but there was no way to get some animated sprites on the screen. I pretty much instantly recognized this and stubbornly decided it was toy language for babies. It wasn't until years later that I realized that Logo had a bunch of neat fundamentals (like functions, which were totally foreign to BASIC-fluent me). It's a shame it wasn't more attractive to a kid like me.

DonHopkins 6y ago

Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64 came with a 6502 assembler written in Logo by Leigh Klotz, that they used to write Logo primitives (for controlling the turtle, etc). It would be ambitious to make a self hosting 6502 Logo meta assembler, by porting the entire 6502 assembly language Logo source code to the 6502 Logo Assembler! Leigh, wasn't the assembler that you used for the original Apple ][ version of Logo written in MacLisp running on a PDP-10? The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found (adafruit.com) 379 points by mmastrac on Oct 4, 2018 | hide | past | web | favorite | 89 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142287 https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/04/the-apple-ii-source-code-for-the-logo-language-found/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/04/the-apple-ii-source-cod... Lars: The link in the article to the code from https://github.com/PDP-10/its https://github.com/PDP-10/its is broken. I found a few references to it in the repo. Did you have to take it down, or did you move it somewhere else? https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/a5694acbf9b6185a36d18d22631914ac40605d6b/doc/logo.md https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/a5694acbf9b6185a36d18d226... >Logo >"I too see the computer presence as a potent influence on the human mind. I am very much aware of the holding power of an interactive computer and of how taking the computer as a model can influence the way we think about ourselves. In fact the work on LOGO to which I have devoted much of the past years consists precisely of developing such forces in positive directions." >Seymour Papert >"Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and for a continually evolving family of computer languages that aid its realization." >Harold Abelson >"Historically, this idea that Logo is mainly turtle graphics is a mistake. Logo’s name comes from the Greek word for word, because Logo was first designed as a language in which to manipulate language: words and sentences." >Brian Harvey >Logo was initially created by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Daniel G.Bobrow, Cynthia Solomon and Richard Grant in 1967 as part of a National Science Foundation sponsored research project conducted at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1969 Dr. Seymour Papert started the Logo Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Throughout the 1970s the majority of Logo development was conducted at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Division for Study and Research in Education, using large research computer systems, such as ITS powered PDP-10. >Our goal is to make that early Logo systems available to a wider audience of enthusiasts for exploration, experimenting and, of course, hacking. [...] >MIT APLOGO >In accordance with Leigh L Klotz Jr., Hal Abelson directed the Logo for the Apple II project at MIT. >MIT APLOGO was developed by Stephen Hain, Patrick G. Sobalvarro and Leigh L Klotz Jr. It was developed and cross-compilled for the Apple-II-Plus Personal Microcomputer on PDP-10 at the MIT LOGO Group. It is direct predecessor for Terrapin Logo. We have a source code for assembling an improved version from 7/9/81 at its/src/aplogo

AstroJetson 6y ago

I love Logo. On of the best program was TLC Logo ( The Lisp Company 1983). They had added some extensions that made it even more powerful. The Book, Thininking about TLC logo with the Turtle cartoons (by Allen, Burke, Johnson) was super easy to learn. It's a shame it never made it to the PC stage.