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- Hacker News
- LCSI LogoWriter for 68k Macs[0] was my shit. It was my first[1] introduction to programming in elementary school and I spent hours trying to make games with it. There were 4 turtles and you could treat them like sprites; you give them custom shapes and colours, and there were basic collision detection primitives. You could also check for collisions with the background by querying the colour under a turtle. You could play and record your own sounds... spent so much time with that little round Apple microphone[2] recording goofy sound effects.
[0] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6717-logo-writer-2-0
[1] technically I had used the Apple II version a couple times first
[2] https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/macintosh-to-p...
by msarnoff - Logo was my introduction to programming. Working on a 1 MHz Commodore64, my masterpiece was a fireworks show that was animated by the fact that the individual drawing commands were so slow you could watch them play out.
So, draw a curve from the ground to the sky. Draw some explosion shape. Change pen color to the sky color. Draw the curve and the explosion again to erase them. Change pen color and start the next firework.
by corysama - Back in 1983, my elementary school was a part of a Logo pilot program. We had a lab of Commodore 64's that I had free run of (my mom was a teacher there), and it's why I do what I do all these years later.
What I find interesting it that it's not just programming, specifically. Logo is a highly interactive and dynamic language (a relative of Lisp), and that influenced the way I think about writing code. Seymour Papert did a lot for me, albeit highly indirectly.
by mschaef - Logo was my first contact with computer (pc 386)by r2ob
- Kicked off so many memories...
Early 80's I learned Logo and Basic at a local store that sold Apple computers. It was called "The Logical Choice" and had a classroom tucked away behind a false wall and an English Sheep dog "Sir Isaac Newton" that would hang around the store!
Nice, I just found a story on the store, page 5 of [1].
[1] https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...
by kdavis - One of my most vivid memories from my childhood (around 10 years old) is trying to make a ticking analog clock using Logo, with the turtle drawing all the hands.
We had "no screen in the morning" house rule - we had to eat, play outside first while it was not too hot. I woke up and realised what was wrong with my code. And my mum made an exception to the rule and the fix worked! I am so grateful to her for understanding the importance of the moment and allowing me to do the fix. I guess I'll give her a call and tell her the story now :) Thanks HackerNews!
by hs586 - Logo was created by by Seymour Papert. I highly recommend his book Mindstorms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) It was written in 1980 but could have mostly been written today. All the same issues with teachers misunderstandings and fear of math and technology and refusal to change to meet the challenges of the age.by briandw
- Do you think the state of mathophobia and the systems driving has improved since his book? Or worsened? Stayed the same?
- I read that book earlier this year. It made me rethink how we approach problem solving in team environments. I now aspire for code I write to be able to be played with as a child would play with a turtle. I find this lack of being able to play is what makes it hard for software developers to really understand each other’s work.
There’s also a section in that book that briefly talks about agentic modeling in the same way people use LLM’s today. I find it fascinating that this idea was already that old at that time.
by ejflick - I believe it is legally available as a PDF — as far as I remember via the ACM?
Very important book.
by dofm - One of my favorite books is Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680936/turtles-termites-and-...), basically the thesis of one of his students (and current MIT Media Lab professor) Mitchel Resnick. It's about the educational value of modeling distributed systems with StarLogo.by jkestner
- The first line of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) is "Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon." so you are correct but it is nice to mention his co-inventors. I agree about the book. I had to borrow it from a friend, read it quickly and give it back in 1983 so my memories of it are a bit fuzzy.by jecel
- I didn't win logo programming competition in polish equivalent of 7th grade and I am still salty about it
- ha. 4th grade for me, though I'm more amused than salty about the affair. who's ever heard of 'recursion'? honestly.by knome
- I learned the Language through examples because the version provided by the school didn't have documentation and in 00s Poland internet was still relatively rare.
I... participed in the competition, but that's all.
by Tade0 - This is on top of HN right now, and there is still nobody who has mentioned the fact that the tier-1 book Turtle Geometry <https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/4663/Turtle-Geomet...> , is in open access.
Do yourself a favor, and read it today : it is that good. Even though it is quite depressing to see that the revolution in education that the book was predicting in its preface, simply never happened.
- I was not expecting to see that the book would culminate in a chapter on general relativity!by madcaptenor
- Gotta agree it's really good! Chapter 1 is already a banger. Did you manage to recreate all those explorations on LOGO yourself?
- There was also "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams" which uses a parallelized version of logo to explore ideas about decentralized systems and is really excellent: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680936/turtles-termites-and-...by mcphage
- I'm forever grateful for having the access to Logo programming in early 90s, as a kid from a 3rd world country, for how it leads to where I am today.
My first ever english word that I can spell out is REPEAT.
by Bankq - Me too. It was one of my first experiences with programming languages back in elementary school in Brazil.
- Is "3rd world country" basically "Not a NATO country, but also not an Eastern Bloc country"?by sssilver
- In the early nineties in elementary school I lived in Belgium, and went to a summer camp where we programmed with Logo in a localized French version.
I had played with Logo on Apple IIe's in the US, and thought it made sense that in a French-speaking region[0] they'd have a French version. I relearned what little I already knew, but regrettably, this did not help greatly with my French skills.
All I remember from this is that `hazard' was the random built-in. Dunno why that's stuck, but there's probably some more important bit of information that should be in my brain if that weren't.
[0] Yeah, yeah, I know French, Flemish, and German are the official languages. I was in a French-speaking part.
by mauvehaus - I still remember when we learned logo in elementary school. I had to get my mom to go out and buy a 3.5" disk so I could save my programs.
When I realized that all of logo was actually saved on that disk and I could continue playing with the turtle at home, I was amazed.
Drawing little things, realizing that I was repeating stuff and breaking it into little functions so I could draw them again more easily. I was learning the essentials of programming and didn't even realize it.
by ihumanable - Also as a child, I was amazed by the associative tables it offered; I thought "I can make intelligent programs". I think I was thinking AI but I won't trust my memory on this. But I played a lot more with the turtle.by astrobe_
- We had it (or one of the clones) in middle school, but it was a demo version that had saving disabled. Half of each class was messing with the turtle. The other half was writing down the code with pen and paper so that we can have it graded.by Xirdus
- I remember learning LOGO in school. There was a single 4K computer for the entire school, so we learned how to program by calling out turtle commands to the teacher who would draw the results with a marker on a sheet of plastic on an overhead projector.
At the end of that exercise, the accumulated commands would be taken to the computer (in another part of the school) and entered into the computer, and eventually we'd get a plotter printout showing the results.
Those early days of computing feel like we were like being on another planet.
by reaperducer - For many years, our students[0] have used Logo as an integral part of their math circle-style[1] classes. When we started Wally Feurzeig, one of the creators of Logo, was instrumental in helping us incorporate ideas from Logo into the kind of non-standard problem solving that we were striving for. Turtle geometry is a particularly helpful "instrument of the mind" for exploring dynamic geometry. Our co-founder, Victor Gutenmacher, wrote an incredible book[2] on "geometry in motion," which gave a completely different perspective on geometry from the one seen in school and which our students could explore with the help of Logo. For many of our students, especially those with math anxiety, Logo was what enabled them to overcome that anxiety and discover the joy of thinking and tinkering. Many programmers today have fond memories of getting into programming via Logo, but I would argue that despite the current blistering pace of progress, it remains one of the best and gentlest introductions to problem solving and computational thinking.
[0] https://www.gentleknowledge.com/
by imb - I'm curious!
1. Are your students still using LOGO? (if yes, which one? if no, what did you moved on to?) 2. Given everything you've said about LOGO, including how it transforms the student's relation with math from anxiety to joy of tinkering, do you think that LOGO should be learned by everyone? 3. Hate to be the guy bringing AI into this but, but do you mind expanding on your arguments on why LOGO still has a place admits this blistering pace of progress?
- Was [2] meant to be https://www.amazon.com/Lines-Curves-Practical-Geometry-Handb... ? In my browser your link brought up a page with no book. I found the above by searching for Gutenmacher.by abecedarius