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The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). On page 20, it says, "LOGO is, up to surface structure, m

by susam 4y ago

The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). On page 20, it says, "LOGO is, up to surface structure, more or less equivalent to LISP." It further says, "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world." And then in a later bullet point on page 22, "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages." This bullet point ends with, "Our findings can at least be partly explained by the cleanliness by which the basic computational ideas are embodied in LISP/LOGO." In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life!

PaulHoule 4y ago
People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education in the 8-bit age, they were hoping they could push out LOGO as a new standard but it did not get a lot of traction. Three years later Byte ran a special issue on LOGO which I thought was one of the best issues of Byte ever https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08 in particular it had some great reviews of LOGO implementations for different home computers some of which were pretty strange like the TRS-80 Coco and the TI-99/4A. It was very close to the cultural peak of the 1980s before Michael Jackson dropped off the charts, the Atari 2600 went down without being immediately replaced (unless you count the C-64), etc. Byte was a lively magazine so long as the market was split up between a wide range of computers but it never really found it's niche in a world dominated by the IBM PC at the high end and the C-64 at the low end. Speaking of which, LISP never really caught on in the 8-bit era. This issue has some articles about how you would do so but it didn't seem to shoehorn so well into a tiny machine (like the 1k of RAM on the Sinclair ZX80) as BASIC did. From the viewpoint of a kid who just learned BASIC, FORTH seemed to offer a lot of what LISP did and it was very available, even if it was a few weeks of assembly coding to write a FORTH.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Pegasus Lisp for the 6502 Apple II was pretty god - I really enjoyed it.
- abrax3141 4y ago
  > People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education Like how we are all aghast at Python now. (All us Lispers, anyhow :-)
kogus 4y ago
My first experience programming was with a LOGO turtle in third grade. I remember the lab full of Apple IIs, and the joy of PEN DOWN, UP 10, PEN UP style commands.
ylee 4y ago
>The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). Hacker News discussion of BYTE's special Logo issue: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556> >In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life! I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. Yep, this was 100% me too. I "got" recursion through math and induction and a bit of graph paper, and the way it made my mind recurse to infinity made me feel ... funny ... in that age. But it wasn't until I used Logo on the school's only Macintosh LC475 that I got the full psychedelic effects. Nothing as intricate as NetLogo (e.g. see its Koch curve here: http://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/models/Sample%20Models/Mathematics/Fractals/Koch%20Curve.nlogo http://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#http://ccl.northwestern.edu...), but still a strong impression. Funnily, that had as a consequence to fall in love with iterative function systems and pizzabox-form desktops, leading to me being introduced to Matila Ghyka's book, and Sun's Sparcstation 5.
bmitc 4y ago
> "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world." Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway... > "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages." If anyone is interested in this, there are the following books: * Exploring Language with Logo: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262570653 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262570653 * Visual Modeling with Logo: A Structured Approach to Seeing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262530694 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262530694 * Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics: https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0262510375 https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificia... * Computer Science Logo Style: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve, and I find it a bit sad that many kids are getting introduced to programming via something like Python or Scratch. I feel there's still space for Logo, and it would be cool to see an easily downloadable and installable version of it.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Scratch was produced at MIT just like Logo and I think it is an evolution of what they were trying to do with Logo.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Despite the heritage of the creators, I personally view Scratch as a misstep. I am a big fan of visual programming, but Scratch is essentially an everyday imperative language with a structured editor and sprites. It doesn't maintain any of the simplicity or elegance of Logo or Lisp, and I'm honestly a bit surprised that the MIT Media Lab invests so much in it.
- abecedarius 4y ago
  Turtle Geometry is still worth checking out. The value is in working through the ideas, and details of Logo take up very little of the book. (I've only glanced through CS Logo Style and haven't seen the other two.)

by susam 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education in the 8-bit age, they were hoping they could push out LOGO as a new standard but it did not get a lot of traction. Three years later Byte ran a special issue on LOGO which I thought was one of the best issues of Byte ever https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08 in particular it had some great reviews of LOGO implementations for different home computers some of which were pretty strange like the TRS-80 Coco and the TI-99/4A. It was very close to the cultural peak of the 1980s before Michael Jackson dropped off the charts, the Atari 2600 went down without being immediately replaced (unless you count the C-64), etc. Byte was a lively magazine so long as the market was split up between a wide range of computers but it never really found it's niche in a world dominated by the IBM PC at the high end and the C-64 at the low end. Speaking of which, LISP never really caught on in the 8-bit era. This issue has some articles about how you would do so but it didn't seem to shoehorn so well into a tiny machine (like the 1k of RAM on the Sinclair ZX80) as BASIC did. From the viewpoint of a kid who just learned BASIC, FORTH seemed to offer a lot of what LISP did and it was very available, even if it was a few weeks of assembly coding to write a FORTH.

mark_l_watson 4y ago
Pegasus Lisp for the 6502 Apple II was pretty god - I really enjoyed it.
abrax3141 4y ago
> People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education Like how we are all aghast at Python now. (All us Lispers, anyhow :-)

kogus 4y ago

My first experience programming was with a LOGO turtle in third grade. I remember the lab full of Apple IIs, and the joy of PEN DOWN, UP 10, PEN UP style commands.

ylee 4y ago

>The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). Hacker News discussion of BYTE's special Logo issue: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556> >In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life! I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

MonkeyClub 4y ago
> I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. Yep, this was 100% me too. I "got" recursion through math and induction and a bit of graph paper, and the way it made my mind recurse to infinity made me feel ... funny ... in that age. But it wasn't until I used Logo on the school's only Macintosh LC475 that I got the full psychedelic effects. Nothing as intricate as NetLogo (e.g. see its Koch curve here: http://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/models/Sample%20Models/Mathematics/Fractals/Koch%20Curve.nlogo http://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#http://ccl.northwestern.edu...), but still a strong impression. Funnily, that had as a consequence to fall in love with iterative function systems and pizzabox-form desktops, leading to me being introduced to Matila Ghyka's book, and Sun's Sparcstation 5.

bmitc 4y ago

> "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world." Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway... > "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages." If anyone is interested in this, there are the following books: * Exploring Language with Logo: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262570653 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262570653 * Visual Modeling with Logo: A Structured Approach to Seeing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262530694 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262530694 * Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics: https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0262510375 https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificia... * Computer Science Logo Style: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve, and I find it a bit sad that many kids are getting introduced to programming via something like Python or Scratch. I feel there's still space for Logo, and it would be cool to see an easily downloadable and installable version of it.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Scratch was produced at MIT just like Logo and I think it is an evolution of what they were trying to do with Logo.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Despite the heritage of the creators, I personally view Scratch as a misstep. I am a big fan of visual programming, but Scratch is essentially an everyday imperative language with a structured editor and sprites. It doesn't maintain any of the simplicity or elegance of Logo or Lisp, and I'm honestly a bit surprised that the MIT Media Lab invests so much in it.
abecedarius 4y ago
Turtle Geometry is still worth checking out. The value is in working through the ideas, and details of Logo take up very little of the book. (I've only glanced through CS Logo Style and haven't seen the other two.)