Forty Years of LOGO

SoyChemist writes "Forty years ago, LOGO, a derivative of LISP, was born. Several years later, it became the cornerstone of educational software that simultaneously taught geometry and how to think like a coder. With a plethora of high-end educational software packages to choose from, each with flashy multimedia and trademarked characters, parents and teachers may find the humble turtle a bit outdated. Thankfully, several LOGO programs are available for free through a variety of websites, but perhaps 3D programming environments like Alice will be the wave of the future."

Comments

massively-parallel-turtle

[stoolpigeon]

so turtles all the way down?

Re:LOGO vs. BASIC

[ZeroPly]

LOGO was actually fun - the point was what your program did, not how pretty your code was...

Back in high school, after reading a book "Turtle Graphics" I created my own turtle environment in Basic on the Apple IIc. I set it up for multiple turtles so that I could give each of them rules (inadvertently modeling a predator-prey system long before I knew what it was). I remember one day I left the computer running on a fairly complex set of rules that had each turtle avoiding the edge, following and avoiding other turtles with 90 degree turns only, etc. etc.

When I came back about an hour and a half later after lunch I discovered that my program had drawn an intricate fractal swastika across the whole screen. The teacher and several other students had already seen this. Much fun explaining that one - thank heavens it was before the modern paranoid age of "zero tolerance" in schools.

Learning programming used to be more fun back then. Instead of clean code that did boring things, we wrote sloppy code that did fun things. Nowadays the pedagogues dictate what kids learn, not the geeks. I feel a bit sorry for the younger people learning CS nowadays because there's no way to convey what the atmosphere was like back in the 80s.

Alice doesn't live *where* anymore?

[Zero__Kelvin]

From the alice.org website:

Try Alice out for yourself. Available on all three platforms - PC, Mac and Linux

Given that Alice is "a free gift to you form Carnegie Mellon University", you would think they would know that there are more than three platforms in the world. On the other hand, at least they don't think "all three platforms" are XP, Vista, and DOS.

Re:lopgo vs python

[RoboJ1M]

Oh yeah?? Then what was GOSUB and GOTO for then? Eh, smart alec?? Yeah... Told... ;)
Actually, it had PROC. Wasn't it DIM PROC somethingsomething.. too long ago.
LOGO rocked.

J1M.