6 ms·

FD 100

95 points by AlexeyBrin 5y ago

empressplay 5y ago
If you'd like to play around with a 3D implementation of Logo, check out https://turtlespaces.org https://turtlespaces.org -- there's a webassembly build that runs in the browser with a Javascript IDE, and compiled application versions for Windows, macOS and Linux
slmjkdbtl 5y ago
This is so amazing, using absolute minimal primitives to achieve interesting results. Would love to see more FD100 works.
- AlexeyBrin 5y ago
  There is an entire book dedicated to Turtle geometry: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Computer-as-a-Medium-for https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Co...
- gagzilla 5y ago
  There are also web implementations like https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ or https://turtleacademy.com/ https://turtleacademy.com/ which kids love to play with (and I'll admit is fun for us adults too!) The fern example in particular is surprisingly beautiful.
drewg123 5y ago
I agree 100% with the author -- logo as a child is what started me on programming. My first programming experience was in ~1981 or so when my elementary school teacher brought an Apple II into our classroom. She was getting her MS in education, and it was on-loan from her college. It was loaded with Apple Logo, and you had to pry me away from it with a crowbar. That was one of the first times I stayed after school willingly. I hounded my parents mercilessly until they finally bought an Apple II clone. I eventually learned BASIC, and learned debugging and "hacking" by fixing the games that I typed in (incorrectly) from magazines and modifying them to do different things.
loeg 5y ago
Discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28461915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28461915
llimos 5y ago
Such great memories... Logo, then moving on to Basic on the VTech Pre-Computer 1000, then GW-BASIC on PC (which to this day I never figured out how to exit! I used to turn the computer off and on again)
- krallja 5y ago
  SYSTEM
  - llimos 5y ago
    Where were you when I needed you 30 years ago??
    - krallja 5y ago
      Elementary school :-\
  - onetom 5y ago
    I also struggled with this for awhile... Can't remember how have I figured it out at the end. I was programming in Forth before, so I even tried BYE :)
shimonabi 5y ago
In those days we had no internet. There were no books about LOGO programming in the library. The math teacher taught us the basic commands, but didn't explain the REPEAT command so we could understand and the importance of it. So I had no examples to follow or a real mentor to suggest a book. Later I learned some basic Pascal, but it was only in high school when I taught myself programming in C++.
robin_reala 5y ago
We had a LOGO turtle at school in the late 80s I guess? I can’t remember if it was hooked up to the BBC Micros or the RM Nimbus pseudo-PC that were popular in UK schools at the time. But either way, it seemed amazingly cool.
lambdaba 5y ago
> Logo gave me a brief taste of functional programming even though back then I did not know the term "functional programming". This is what Unix pipes did for me. By the time I started programming constructing programs as series of side effect-free transformations felt perfectly natural (to be precise I did have some previous imperative programming experience and I didn't like it / grok it)
- Rygian 5y ago
  I was surprised by this statement, as logo commands form very much an imperative language.
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    Superficially it looked like that... but I know very little about Logo, although Wikipedia puts it in the "Lisp" family so?
  - macintux 5y ago
    Imperative and FP aren't really in opposition; Erlang, e.g., has been described as a functional language with an imperative core.
pjscott 5y ago
I had the strangest experience with Logo in junior high. The computer class taught people some basic drawing commands -- going forward, turning left and right, moving the virtual pen up and down, etc. -- but for some reason banned us from using any commands that were "too advanced", by which they meant anything beyond the basic drawing primitives. The thing is, the whole point of Logo is to make thing like looping and conditionals visually intuitive and fun. A the time it was frustrating; in retrospect it's also farcical. Such a waste!
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  It's possible that they didn't have anyone who knew the "advanced" commands, and didn't want precocious kids asking questions they couldn't answer.
  - pjscott 5y ago
    I wonder how many people’s learning has been held back because a teacher was too prideful to say the words “I don’t know” and then suggest looking it up.
    - ta988 5y ago
      Unfortunately too many and it is still the case. France can't hire teachers, can't keep the ones it has and continues to force young unexperimented ones into the harshest areas. In US it is not better, most are only some kind of test preparers and discipline managers...
- macintux 5y ago
  I ran into that problem taking a Basic class in high school. I think it boiled down to the teacher didn't know much more than what he was presenting, so he didn't want us to jump ahead.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    Fortunately we had the opposite. We had pascal and C classes until my senior year, when she started offering Visual Basic (which she was learning as she went). At the time QB then VB was my thing (I was working on multiplayer games using winsock controls), so she would ask me questions if someone went beyond her knowledge.
sundarurfriend 5y ago
This seems a pretty common thing, to have a pleasant nostalgic memory of Logo as a fun introduction to programming. My experience with it was pretty different - I found it pretty pointless and boring at the time, and it didn't have any pull on me the way C later did. Ironically, a big part of what made C fun for me were the Borland conio (console I/O) and graphics libraries. But those were fun only because I could respond to user interactions, and make simple games and other playful things. Looking back on it, that was probably the missing ingredient with Logo for me - we were never taught any ways of user input, they were just static programs that did one thing, and that feels fundamentally different.
raintrees 5y ago
I did the "heathkit" version of programming: Typing in basic code for a version of lunar lander on a TRS-80 on the sale floor of my local Radio Shack. Later I learned to write my own kits. And sometime after that, I got others to pay me for the pleasure - Winning!
layer8 5y ago
My first programming language (aside from HP-12C routines) was COMAL on the C64. COMAL was advertised as being halfway between BASIC and PASCAL, and it also had LOGO turtle graphics commands and featured a corresponding split screen text/graphics view. Great times.

95 points by AlexeyBrin 5y ago

If you'd like to play around with a 3D implementation of Logo, check out https://turtlespaces.org https://turtlespaces.org -- there's a webassembly build that runs in the browser with a Javascript IDE, and compiled application versions for Windows, macOS and Linux

slmjkdbtl 5y ago

This is so amazing, using absolute minimal primitives to achieve interesting results. Would love to see more FD100 works.

AlexeyBrin 5y ago
There is an entire book dedicated to Turtle geometry: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Computer-as-a-Medium-for https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Co...
gagzilla 5y ago
There are also web implementations like https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ or https://turtleacademy.com/ https://turtleacademy.com/ which kids love to play with (and I'll admit is fun for us adults too!) The fern example in particular is surprisingly beautiful.

drewg123 5y ago

I agree 100% with the author -- logo as a child is what started me on programming. My first programming experience was in ~1981 or so when my elementary school teacher brought an Apple II into our classroom. She was getting her MS in education, and it was on-loan from her college. It was loaded with Apple Logo, and you had to pry me away from it with a crowbar. That was one of the first times I stayed after school willingly. I hounded my parents mercilessly until they finally bought an Apple II clone. I eventually learned BASIC, and learned debugging and "hacking" by fixing the games that I typed in (incorrectly) from magazines and modifying them to do different things.

loeg 5y ago

Discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28461915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28461915

llimos 5y ago

Such great memories... Logo, then moving on to Basic on the VTech Pre-Computer 1000, then GW-BASIC on PC (which to this day I never figured out how to exit! I used to turn the computer off and on again)

krallja 5y ago
SYSTEM
- llimos 5y ago
  Where were you when I needed you 30 years ago??
  - krallja 5y ago
    Elementary school :-\
- onetom 5y ago
  I also struggled with this for awhile... Can't remember how have I figured it out at the end. I was programming in Forth before, so I even tried BYE :)

shimonabi 5y ago

In those days we had no internet. There were no books about LOGO programming in the library. The math teacher taught us the basic commands, but didn't explain the REPEAT command so we could understand and the importance of it. So I had no examples to follow or a real mentor to suggest a book. Later I learned some basic Pascal, but it was only in high school when I taught myself programming in C++.

robin_reala 5y ago

We had a LOGO turtle at school in the late 80s I guess? I can’t remember if it was hooked up to the BBC Micros or the RM Nimbus pseudo-PC that were popular in UK schools at the time. But either way, it seemed amazingly cool.

lambdaba 5y ago

> Logo gave me a brief taste of functional programming even though back then I did not know the term "functional programming". This is what Unix pipes did for me. By the time I started programming constructing programs as series of side effect-free transformations felt perfectly natural (to be precise I did have some previous imperative programming experience and I didn't like it / grok it)

Rygian 5y ago
I was surprised by this statement, as logo commands form very much an imperative language.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  Superficially it looked like that... but I know very little about Logo, although Wikipedia puts it in the "Lisp" family so?
- macintux 5y ago
  Imperative and FP aren't really in opposition; Erlang, e.g., has been described as a functional language with an imperative core.

pjscott 5y ago

I had the strangest experience with Logo in junior high. The computer class taught people some basic drawing commands -- going forward, turning left and right, moving the virtual pen up and down, etc. -- but for some reason banned us from using any commands that were "too advanced", by which they meant anything beyond the basic drawing primitives. The thing is, the whole point of Logo is to make thing like looping and conditionals visually intuitive and fun. A the time it was frustrating; in retrospect it's also farcical. Such a waste!

sundarurfriend 5y ago
It's possible that they didn't have anyone who knew the "advanced" commands, and didn't want precocious kids asking questions they couldn't answer.
- pjscott 5y ago
  I wonder how many people’s learning has been held back because a teacher was too prideful to say the words “I don’t know” and then suggest looking it up.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Unfortunately too many and it is still the case. France can't hire teachers, can't keep the ones it has and continues to force young unexperimented ones into the harshest areas. In US it is not better, most are only some kind of test preparers and discipline managers...
macintux 5y ago
I ran into that problem taking a Basic class in high school. I think it boiled down to the teacher didn't know much more than what he was presenting, so he didn't want us to jump ahead.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Fortunately we had the opposite. We had pascal and C classes until my senior year, when she started offering Visual Basic (which she was learning as she went). At the time QB then VB was my thing (I was working on multiplayer games using winsock controls), so she would ask me questions if someone went beyond her knowledge.

sundarurfriend 5y ago

This seems a pretty common thing, to have a pleasant nostalgic memory of Logo as a fun introduction to programming. My experience with it was pretty different - I found it pretty pointless and boring at the time, and it didn't have any pull on me the way C later did. Ironically, a big part of what made C fun for me were the Borland conio (console I/O) and graphics libraries. But those were fun only because I could respond to user interactions, and make simple games and other playful things. Looking back on it, that was probably the missing ingredient with Logo for me - we were never taught any ways of user input, they were just static programs that did one thing, and that feels fundamentally different.

raintrees 5y ago

I did the "heathkit" version of programming: Typing in basic code for a version of lunar lander on a TRS-80 on the sale floor of my local Radio Shack. Later I learned to write my own kits. And sometime after that, I got others to pay me for the pleasure - Winning!

layer8 5y ago

My first programming language (aside from HP-12C routines) was COMAL on the C64. COMAL was advertised as being halfway between BASIC and PASCAL, and it also had LOGO turtle graphics commands and featured a corresponding split screen text/graphics view. Great times.