8 ms·

Past and Future Turtles: The Evolution of the Logo Programming Language (Part 1)

121 points by empressplay 5y ago

aksss 5y ago
Recipe for growing a programmer: take one kid, add logo and legos.
- matthew_kuiash 5y ago
  Logo was one of the 3 I first picked up on Assembler, BASIC and Logo. My first computers weren't capable of running LOGO (no real display). I didn't have a LOGO interpreter so I coded one in BASIC. By god it was slow. But I did pick up structured programming and it led me on to LISP (and SASL/CLU,Pascal,Modula 2). Somehow I still ended up using C/C++ daily. I guess that's just how it goes. But LOGO was and is nice. It (almost) has what my dad calls IKR (Immediate Knowledge of Results) and if LOGO were to develop further it is exactly the area of realtime interactivity I think it should move. Great language with a lot of thought put into it but still very much a product of its era.
- tartoran 5y ago
  Logo was my second programming language after basic when I was around 9 years old. I did not have access to much lego in my country but agree that it is a very good way to stimulate young minds. My son’s just 3yo and since he was about 2 we started playing with lego blocks, at the beginning large ones then moved onto regular legos. I am very reluctant to introduce him to the digital world and will delay that for as long as possible. Instead I will be buying phisical kits, puzzles and games for him and let him explore this way. Luckily he’s not into action figures and weapon toys.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Or give them programming books with pictures nice for kids to follow up. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?genre=Book https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?genre=Book
mgkimsal 5y ago
Unit testing Logo involves a mock turtle. I'll be here all week, thank you.
- layer8 5y ago
  You probably can make software of unknown pedigree out of it.
- debo_ 5y ago
  And you can run those tests from the shell...
daniellarusso 5y ago
My school started children in elementary and middle-school on Logo, then Pascal for high-school.
- aerospace_guy 5y ago
  Same here but only in elementary school. At least back in 2004. We moved from Logo -> QBasic -> Visual Basic -> HTML -> Java -> C before graduating high school.
  - alexshendi 5y ago
    An impressive downward spiral. SCNR.
- okprod 5y ago
  That's interesting; back when I was in high school I learned Logo, BASIC, then C++.
  - Max_aaa 5y ago
    We did this at school too.
  - tylerscott 5y ago
    That was also my progression! The end of the road was the C++ AP test my junior year of high school. I believe we were the last year of the C++ test with Java being used after that.
buescher 5y ago
I always thought Logo would be great for PHP-style web programming.
- notahacker 5y ago
  Watching a website draw itself with a turtle would be quite an interesting transition effect too.
vincent-manis 5y ago
I was very involved with Logo back in the 1970s and 80s. I spent a fair bit of time at BBN working with Wally Feurzeig and crew, and ran a number of Logo workshops for teachers here in British Columbia. I finally gave up when I realized that most of the teachers I worked with saw the pretty pictures produced by the screen turtle as the goal, rather than the deep insights produced by the programming process. For them, Logo was never going to be anything more than an Etch-a-Sketch. Sigh
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- empressplay 5y ago
  It's definitely a tough one when thinking about marketing Logo, because the educators do need to be Logo-savvy for it to work in a classroom setting and it's hard to convince them to take the time to learn it properly themselves. That's why I think it's better to try to get contemporary Logo into code camps, because the facilitators are more motivated and have some enthusiasm for it. But we'll see :) Could you please e-mail me at melody at retrocoders.org ? I'd love to chat with you about BBN. We're in Victoria
  - vincent-manis 5y ago
    Will do!
  - bitwize 5y ago
    That's the problem with just about every well-meaning "computers in education" program, even more recent efforts like OLPC. The teachers have to understand the power of the machine and the insights and abstract critical thinking that can be taught through it. Most teachers are like the sort I grew up with: they would hold floppy disks by sticking their fingers through the hole in the middle. And they mishandled kids even more destructively, treating them like vessels into which it was their job to pour the curriculum.
    - floren 5y ago
yumraj 5y ago
Is there a Logo based curriculum/problem-solution set that can be used to introduce young kids to programming?
- alexshendi 5y ago
  See: 1. [http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html] 2.[https://turtlespaces.org/books/ https://turtlespaces.org/books/] 1. may be too advanced for children...
turtlegeometry 5y ago
I just checked again, and thank God, it seems the book "Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics" is in Open Access. No book has ever can come close to the magnificent exposition of geometry and programming you'll find in it : https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Computer-as-a-Medium-for https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Co...
- empressplay 5y ago
  Lots of great ideas in there! Thanks for the link!
- abecedarius 5y ago
  This is a marvelous book coauthored by one of the SICP coauthors. In contrast to SICP its focus is on math more than programming, and it aims at exploring math more than covering a curriculum for a course. In Logo's heyday there were several other fine Logo books -- like Brian Harvey's Computer Science Logo Style, and one whose title I'm forgetting, by several authors, billing itself as for a particular Logo implementation but with lots of rather interesting projects like a basic proof assistant.
jedberg 5y ago
On any Mac from the last 15 years: $ python >>> from turtle import * You now have logo! You can do 'fd(100)' for example and it will pop up a window with the turtle. I plan to have my kids do this when they get a little older.
- somethoughts 5y ago
  Somewhat similar but in the browser - which is useful if you are trying to teach a bunch of kids on a smorgasbord of Macs, Chromebooks, Windows machines. https://hourofpython.trinket.io/a-visual-introduction-to-python#/welcome/an-hour-of-code https://hourofpython.trinket.io/a-visual-introduction-to-pyt...
- RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
  Having access to a language with a turtle is nice, but Python really is not the same thing as Logo. Logo is a small, simple, and powerful language. It has simple syntax and a small number of concepts, making it easy to learn. Python is a large, hairy scripting language that is currently an in-vogue way to glue together performant C libraries and get work done. Python can be useful, but I do not think it is nearly as well suited to education as Logo is.
  - xapata 5y ago
    You misunderstood. You can provide the Logo experience with Python.
    - RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
      I understood. My point is that python does not provide the logo experience, just one small but particularly iconic portion thereof.
      - xapata 5y ago
        The syntax is slightly different, but it's similar enough, I think.
RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
Logo is truly a delightful little functional language. I've written a few implementations over the years- this one is built in Forth, drawing from Apple ][ logo: http://johnearnest.github.io/Mako.js/?rom=Loko http://johnearnest.github.io/Mako.js/?rom=Loko And another written in Java, as part of a more elaborate edutainment adventure game I still have in an unfinished state: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/MLogo https://github.com/JohnEarnest/MLogo
- empressplay 5y ago
  Could you please elaborate on your game idea? I'm wanting to do something similar, but I haven't quite found anything that I'm happy with, and I'd love to hear what you had in mind, if you were willing to share...
  - RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
    I have a few recordings of the prototype here- under "All the Way Down": https://beyondloom.com/games/index.html https://beyondloom.com/games/index.html If it really piques your curiosity, I might be able to dig up the demo build I distributed to a few colleagues. Oh, and another feature that isn't really shown off there is the manual- all of the examples can copied into an editor buffer and then tinkered with directly at the REPL: https://i.imgur.com/CwCaLY5.gif https://i.imgur.com/CwCaLY5.gif
- lmm 5y ago
  It feels very un-functional to me - the turtle is extremely stateful.
djrogers 5y ago
I got my start with computers in 2nd or 3rd grade, in our elementary school computer lab filled with Commodore 64s running LOGO. I and one or two other kids would get to leave the class before 'computers' early to boot up each of the glowing boxes of power, feed them their floppy discs, and load LOGO on all of them before everyone else got there. As a reward, we'd sometimes get to spend our lunch hour with them unsupervised. This led to us learning basic, finding early demoscene-like animations (that someone got from a high schooler! wow!), and typing in programs from the backs of computer magazines. I'll never forget that feeling of discovery and control - it was so empowering to be able to make this box do something that I created. Now I spend my days trying to thwart ransomware and cybercrime... sigh...
slacktide 5y ago
Gcode: Logo you can use to build stuff.
BrandiATMuhkuh 5y ago
I used NetLogo white a bit. It used the logo language for agent based simulations. Pretty cool stuff https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
andai 5y ago
Most impressive to me is that the turtle was originally an actual (robot) turtle. Even nowadays with all the fancy graphics, surely students would be much more excited about programming an actual robot than a little triangle on the screen! And since we're still paying >$100 for 1990s tier graphing calculators (OK, I think they finally got color screens) it doesn't seem infeasible to give each student their own little robot to play around with? Also, can anyone confirm that the Turtle robot is from the 1940s? What's the story behind that? Edit: Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots
EL_Loco 5y ago
There is a company that makes a couple of hardware logo turtles. They've been at it for quite some time too: https://www.terrapinlogo.com/products/robots.html https://www.terrapinlogo.com/products/robots.html edit: there's also a very good three-book series for beginners called Computer Science Logo Style, by a UC Berkeley prof whose name I can't recall... Brian Harvey maybe?
- retr0nerd 5y ago
  I started with their LOGO on Apple ][s back on the early 80s. I reached out to them a while back to let them know the impact they had on my career.
empressplay 5y ago
Thanks to everyone who tried out turtleSpaces! While we're aware we're just one Logo in a vast lineage of Logos, we're passionate about helping to make Logo relevant again, if even just a little bit. So thank you.
zdiscov 5y ago
Even in this day and age, I was pleasantly surprised to find logo being taught in my kids school as one of the main subjects in elementary! Principal's eyes glistened with moisture when I complemented her on this! Apparently they receive a ton of flak each year from parents for not being in the know and teaching the latest/hottest/.. languages.
fabiensanglard 5y ago
I spent countless hours in French middle school, learning to move the tortue with Logo. We used MO5 in a nanoréseau. I liked it so much that I took extra course after hours to do more of it. This was thanks to French state "Plan_informatique_pour_tous"'plan (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous) which put a computer in every middle school of the country.
cies 5y ago
I wrote a language similar to logo, with some of it's main features including the turtle: https://apps.kde.org/kturtle/ https://apps.kde.org/kturtle/
nivertech 5y ago
As a kid I learned to program using a book introducing a Logo-inspired programming language with the Russian syntax - Robic [1,2]. It had a concept of an Agents living in an Environment. It had several builtin agents, i.e. an "Ant" and a "Painter", etc. The syntax was more Pascal-like than Logo itself. Just like Logo it was designed to teach programming to very young kids. It was rather limited, so the second half of the book was introducing Rapira [3,4] - a SETL-based programming language with Russian keywords. It was rather advanced dynamic language and had lots of data types: tuples, sets, etc. Recently at work I did some simulations using NetLogo - so it was fun. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic [2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira [4] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B0_(%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80...

121 points by empressplay 5y ago

aksss 5y ago

Recipe for growing a programmer: take one kid, add logo and legos.

matthew_kuiash 5y ago
Logo was one of the 3 I first picked up on Assembler, BASIC and Logo. My first computers weren't capable of running LOGO (no real display). I didn't have a LOGO interpreter so I coded one in BASIC. By god it was slow. But I did pick up structured programming and it led me on to LISP (and SASL/CLU,Pascal,Modula 2). Somehow I still ended up using C/C++ daily. I guess that's just how it goes. But LOGO was and is nice. It (almost) has what my dad calls IKR (Immediate Knowledge of Results) and if LOGO were to develop further it is exactly the area of realtime interactivity I think it should move. Great language with a lot of thought put into it but still very much a product of its era.
tartoran 5y ago
Logo was my second programming language after basic when I was around 9 years old. I did not have access to much lego in my country but agree that it is a very good way to stimulate young minds. My son’s just 3yo and since he was about 2 we started playing with lego blocks, at the beginning large ones then moved onto regular legos. I am very reluctant to introduce him to the digital world and will delay that for as long as possible. Instead I will be buying phisical kits, puzzles and games for him and let him explore this way. Luckily he’s not into action figures and weapon toys.
pjmlp 5y ago
Or give them programming books with pictures nice for kids to follow up. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?genre=Book https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?genre=Book

mgkimsal 5y ago

Unit testing Logo involves a mock turtle. I'll be here all week, thank you.

layer8 5y ago
You probably can make software of unknown pedigree out of it.
debo_ 5y ago
And you can run those tests from the shell...

daniellarusso 5y ago

My school started children in elementary and middle-school on Logo, then Pascal for high-school.

aerospace_guy 5y ago
Same here but only in elementary school. At least back in 2004. We moved from Logo -> QBasic -> Visual Basic -> HTML -> Java -> C before graduating high school.
- alexshendi 5y ago
  An impressive downward spiral. SCNR.
okprod 5y ago
That's interesting; back when I was in high school I learned Logo, BASIC, then C++.
- Max_aaa 5y ago
  We did this at school too.
- tylerscott 5y ago
  That was also my progression! The end of the road was the C++ AP test my junior year of high school. I believe we were the last year of the C++ test with Java being used after that.

buescher 5y ago

I always thought Logo would be great for PHP-style web programming.

notahacker 5y ago
Watching a website draw itself with a turtle would be quite an interesting transition effect too.

vincent-manis 5y ago

I was very involved with Logo back in the 1970s and 80s. I spent a fair bit of time at BBN working with Wally Feurzeig and crew, and ran a number of Logo workshops for teachers here in British Columbia. I finally gave up when I realized that most of the teachers I worked with saw the pretty pictures produced by the screen turtle as the goal, rather than the deep insights produced by the programming process. For them, Logo was never going to be anything more than an Etch-a-Sketch. Sigh

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
empressplay 5y ago
It's definitely a tough one when thinking about marketing Logo, because the educators do need to be Logo-savvy for it to work in a classroom setting and it's hard to convince them to take the time to learn it properly themselves. That's why I think it's better to try to get contemporary Logo into code camps, because the facilitators are more motivated and have some enthusiasm for it. But we'll see :) Could you please e-mail me at melody at retrocoders.org ? I'd love to chat with you about BBN. We're in Victoria
- vincent-manis 5y ago
  Will do!
- bitwize 5y ago
  That's the problem with just about every well-meaning "computers in education" program, even more recent efforts like OLPC. The teachers have to understand the power of the machine and the insights and abstract critical thinking that can be taught through it. Most teachers are like the sort I grew up with: they would hold floppy disks by sticking their fingers through the hole in the middle. And they mishandled kids even more destructively, treating them like vessels into which it was their job to pour the curriculum.
  - floren 5y ago

yumraj 5y ago

Is there a Logo based curriculum/problem-solution set that can be used to introduce young kids to programming?

alexshendi 5y ago
See: 1. [http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html] 2.[https://turtlespaces.org/books/ https://turtlespaces.org/books/] 1. may be too advanced for children...

turtlegeometry 5y ago

I just checked again, and thank God, it seems the book "Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics" is in Open Access. No book has ever can come close to the magnificent exposition of geometry and programming you'll find in it : https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Computer-as-a-Medium-for https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Co...

empressplay 5y ago
Lots of great ideas in there! Thanks for the link!
abecedarius 5y ago
This is a marvelous book coauthored by one of the SICP coauthors. In contrast to SICP its focus is on math more than programming, and it aims at exploring math more than covering a curriculum for a course. In Logo's heyday there were several other fine Logo books -- like Brian Harvey's Computer Science Logo Style, and one whose title I'm forgetting, by several authors, billing itself as for a particular Logo implementation but with lots of rather interesting projects like a basic proof assistant.

jedberg 5y ago

On any Mac from the last 15 years: $ python >>> from turtle import * You now have logo! You can do 'fd(100)' for example and it will pop up a window with the turtle. I plan to have my kids do this when they get a little older.

somethoughts 5y ago
Somewhat similar but in the browser - which is useful if you are trying to teach a bunch of kids on a smorgasbord of Macs, Chromebooks, Windows machines. https://hourofpython.trinket.io/a-visual-introduction-to-python#/welcome/an-hour-of-code https://hourofpython.trinket.io/a-visual-introduction-to-pyt...
RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
Having access to a language with a turtle is nice, but Python really is not the same thing as Logo. Logo is a small, simple, and powerful language. It has simple syntax and a small number of concepts, making it easy to learn. Python is a large, hairy scripting language that is currently an in-vogue way to glue together performant C libraries and get work done. Python can be useful, but I do not think it is nearly as well suited to education as Logo is.
- xapata 5y ago
  You misunderstood. You can provide the Logo experience with Python.
  - RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
    I understood. My point is that python does not provide the logo experience, just one small but particularly iconic portion thereof.
    - xapata 5y ago
      The syntax is slightly different, but it's similar enough, I think.

RodgerTheGreat 5y ago

Logo is truly a delightful little functional language. I've written a few implementations over the years- this one is built in Forth, drawing from Apple ][ logo: http://johnearnest.github.io/Mako.js/?rom=Loko http://johnearnest.github.io/Mako.js/?rom=Loko And another written in Java, as part of a more elaborate edutainment adventure game I still have in an unfinished state: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/MLogo https://github.com/JohnEarnest/MLogo

empressplay 5y ago
Could you please elaborate on your game idea? I'm wanting to do something similar, but I haven't quite found anything that I'm happy with, and I'd love to hear what you had in mind, if you were willing to share...
- RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
  I have a few recordings of the prototype here- under "All the Way Down": https://beyondloom.com/games/index.html https://beyondloom.com/games/index.html If it really piques your curiosity, I might be able to dig up the demo build I distributed to a few colleagues. Oh, and another feature that isn't really shown off there is the manual- all of the examples can copied into an editor buffer and then tinkered with directly at the REPL: https://i.imgur.com/CwCaLY5.gif https://i.imgur.com/CwCaLY5.gif
lmm 5y ago
It feels very un-functional to me - the turtle is extremely stateful.

djrogers 5y ago

I got my start with computers in 2nd or 3rd grade, in our elementary school computer lab filled with Commodore 64s running LOGO. I and one or two other kids would get to leave the class before 'computers' early to boot up each of the glowing boxes of power, feed them their floppy discs, and load LOGO on all of them before everyone else got there. As a reward, we'd sometimes get to spend our lunch hour with them unsupervised. This led to us learning basic, finding early demoscene-like animations (that someone got from a high schooler! wow!), and typing in programs from the backs of computer magazines. I'll never forget that feeling of discovery and control - it was so empowering to be able to make this box do something that I created. Now I spend my days trying to thwart ransomware and cybercrime... sigh...

slacktide 5y ago

Gcode: Logo you can use to build stuff.

BrandiATMuhkuh 5y ago

I used NetLogo white a bit. It used the logo language for agent based simulations. Pretty cool stuff https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

andai 5y ago

Most impressive to me is that the turtle was originally an actual (robot) turtle. Even nowadays with all the fancy graphics, surely students would be much more excited about programming an actual robot than a little triangle on the screen! And since we're still paying >$100 for 1990s tier graphing calculators (OK, I think they finally got color screens) it doesn't seem infeasible to give each student their own little robot to play around with? Also, can anyone confirm that the Turtle robot is from the 1940s? What's the story behind that? Edit: Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots

EL_Loco 5y ago

There is a company that makes a couple of hardware logo turtles. They've been at it for quite some time too: https://www.terrapinlogo.com/products/robots.html https://www.terrapinlogo.com/products/robots.html edit: there's also a very good three-book series for beginners called Computer Science Logo Style, by a UC Berkeley prof whose name I can't recall... Brian Harvey maybe?

retr0nerd 5y ago
I started with their LOGO on Apple ][s back on the early 80s. I reached out to them a while back to let them know the impact they had on my career.

empressplay 5y ago

Thanks to everyone who tried out turtleSpaces! While we're aware we're just one Logo in a vast lineage of Logos, we're passionate about helping to make Logo relevant again, if even just a little bit. So thank you.

zdiscov 5y ago

Even in this day and age, I was pleasantly surprised to find logo being taught in my kids school as one of the main subjects in elementary! Principal's eyes glistened with moisture when I complemented her on this! Apparently they receive a ton of flak each year from parents for not being in the know and teaching the latest/hottest/.. languages.

fabiensanglard 5y ago

I spent countless hours in French middle school, learning to move the tortue with Logo. We used MO5 in a nanoréseau. I liked it so much that I took extra course after hours to do more of it. This was thanks to French state "Plan_informatique_pour_tous"'plan (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous) which put a computer in every middle school of the country.

cies 5y ago

I wrote a language similar to logo, with some of it's main features including the turtle: https://apps.kde.org/kturtle/ https://apps.kde.org/kturtle/

nivertech 5y ago

As a kid I learned to program using a book introducing a Logo-inspired programming language with the Russian syntax - Robic [1,2]. It had a concept of an Agents living in an Environment. It had several builtin agents, i.e. an "Ant" and a "Painter", etc. The syntax was more Pascal-like than Logo itself. Just like Logo it was designed to teach programming to very young kids. It was rather limited, so the second half of the book was introducing Rapira [3,4] - a SETL-based programming language with Russian keywords. It was rather advanced dynamic language and had lots of data types: tuples, sets, etc. Recently at work I did some simulations using NetLogo - so it was fun. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic [2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira [4] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B0_(%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80...