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Seymour Papert, Creator of the Logo Language, Dies At 88 (mit.edu)
New submitter gwolf writes: The great educator, creator of the Logo programming language, and the enabler for computer education in the 1980s has passed away. Listing his contributions is impossible in an article summary, but the ACM has published a short in-memoriam note for him. Papert is, without exaggeration, one of the people I owe my career and life choices to.
He was really a computing hero. He supported educating children in the field of computer science. Many of us owe a lot to him. It is a shame that most people never learn who the true heroes of computing were.
RIP, Mr. Papert. My first interaction with a computer was giving directions to a triangular "turtle" on an Apple ][ back in the early 80s. It created a love of computers and launched a very rewarding career.
Step 6 feet under.
This was a real computer giant. I remember that my dad got wind of his ideas, and he made sure I had a computer available to tinker with in my late childhood and teen years, something that here (Paraguay, South America) was by no means taken for granted back in the time (late 1970s/1980s). Even to this day Dr. Papert made a significant contribution to Paraguayan education in the form of the XO/OLPC laptops, which are instrumental in educating many Paraguayan children. RIP and thanks for everything Dr. Papert.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
As a part of a comparative languages class in my comp sci program in the '80's, I look ExperTelligence's ExperLogo for a spin on the Mac. I ended up having to drive up to their offices in Goleta, CA to pick up a copy. I liked the syntax, and using what I suppose was a JIT compiler, it was reasonably quick. But, there was no way to create standalone binaries, ExperTelligence didn't stick with it for long, and Logo as a whole didn't get a shot at going beyond a classroom tool.
Kudos to Dr. Papert and Mr. Feurzeig for their contributions to comp sci and education.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Who will answer VGER's call?!
RIP, Mr. Papert. Turtles all the way down.
In 5th grade my computer teacher challenged me to write something other than simple graphics, so I wrote a rudimentary line editor in Atari Logo. I still remember the effort I had to put into designing it / solving the problems that cropped up and the feeling I had when it finally worked.
A great intro to programming.
Not just LOGO but a culture of rich, gentle and welcoming education involving technology. And wonderful to work with. I recently dusted off a copy of logo to put out for a tool in enrichment. The kids still took to it like ducks to water. Thank you Seymour (and Mitch, and Steve and the rest of the lab) for bringing smiles to people learning to think through code.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My first exposure to programming was MicroWorlds, in third grade. I was immediately hooked, and never turned back. I think it's fairly safe to say that if it wasn't for that, my life would be completely different, and probably for the worse. Rest in peace, Dr. Papert. You set out to teach children to program and love programming, and judging by these comments, you succeeded.
When people argue that we have to teach computer science to kids, it's Papert's approach we should be following. It's worth nothing to teach in cool new technologies, as grade school is not meant for work enablement. We don't need kids learning the concept of the fad-languge-of-the-week. We need kids to start learning algorithmic thinking, to understand how to translate a tangible problem into a computer program, and see a mathematically-described result. Many of us got that as kids, and I'm sure that's what sparked so many of the bright minds that pushed the free software movement from a pipe dream into a thriving reality. Programming can be fun. Programming teaches us new ways to think. It's not about marketability of our kids in 5, 10, 15 years - It's about teaching them tools to think, to create.
Thanks for all of your great work, Dr. Papert.
Some people did pretty stuff like flowers. I would have liked someone to have taught me variables and if then statements in basic though. We had no teachers who could do that. All I did was make print rockets in basic.
God spoke to me
Just curious, anyone else out there work with lists and such with logo? It was loosely based on lisp and used "first" and "butfirst" in place of "car" and "cdr". Cool stuff, had an entire other world in there that few people explored.
Do you have ESP?
Waking up to this news today makes me sad, as I'm sure it does many others. Papert was a true pioneer in the field of using computers as tools to think with. He spawned a generation of research, thinkers, projects to further the use of computers as programmable, debuggable machines. His passing comes at a time when computers are increasingly being used as glorified black boards.
He sought to fundamentally redefine computing in education, and he partially succeeded.
The onus now falls on the rest of us.
Thank you Dr Papert, I did not know your name until now however I used Logo in my formative years of programming when on work experience from school on a real life mainframe. Moving that turtle around really made me think about programming so I, sir, learned your lessons and appreciate the impact your work had on my life.
Digital epitaphs seem appropriate - thank you!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Logo on the bbc was my first introduction to programming and I've made a career of it ever since. Thankyou great pioneer and sharer of wisdom.
[site]
I learned it in elementary summer school class and (6/six)th grade. I even bought my own newer version (audio, etc.) copy for my Apple //c.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...but turtle-ly dead.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Also co-author - with Marvin Minsky - of a classic, prescient (if a bit narrow) work on what would become neural network pattern recognition; Perceptrons.
Turned turtle on life......
...experience.
Thank you for Logo, from the bottom of my heart.
I will find a way to easter egg some turtles into our products today :).
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In the mid-eighties, I worked as an apprentice at a place where they used LOGO (M.I.T. Experimental LOGO #43 or some other number) on a mini running TSX (or RT-11, can't remember) to do bookkeeping for about 30 small businesses.
This mini ran about 12 terminals in text-mode (of course) and we had a small complement of clerks entering data.
This LOGO also had NO turtle, although we had an Apple-II that I was given to take home that did have the turtle-graphics.
What this LOGO did have were the list and word operators, which we used to write accounting software that had specialized rounding, which was more precise than using something like C floats because you could calculate precision to any arbitrary limit by simply breaking numbers apart as words and calculating their digits to the decimal place of your choosing. By being strings, they were immune to typical numerical-storage problem.
Another thing I did with LOGO was have almost-constant epiphanies about recursion and abstraction. LOGO was designed to light fires in young minds and it certainly did for me.
Seymour Papert has thus been a hero of mine since then and I've always longed to someday thank him for his work. I offer up my thanks to his spirit. Everything I ever went on to write in software is owed to him.
Thank you again, Mr. Papert and may God rest your soul.
PS - Sadly, one of the partners embezzled the business, which folded and I never got to program in LOGO again professionally, which is a real shame because LOGO was simply wonderful
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
The key thing that a lot of later things that attempted to replace Logo missed was that Logo was not a tool to teach programming, it was a tool to teach computer-aided thinking. Programming follows naturally from that.
QFT. Papert was a mathematician, galled by the failures of existing math education, who determined to make math easy and accessible to kids. It was never about teaching kids how to code, it was about teaching kids how to teach themselves . Logo was a platform for students to learn and practise the structured thinking and analytical problem-solving skills that would enable them to explore and learn effectively by and for themselves thereafter.
The kids totally got this, of course, because kids can learn anything—in this case, how to love learning and how to learn for themselves. Most adults didn't, because they were raised in a system where "learning" means the blind acquisition and rote regurgitation of Aristotlean "facts", and so learned precisely the opposite. Thus they didn't understand what Papert was trying to do, so rejected it out of their own fear of disruption; or just reinterpreted it to mean whatever they already knew, thus giving us modern "computing" education—which is better termed "Computer Religion" for all the Scientific or Mathematical thinking that it teaches.
Funny enough, Papert himself failed to follow his own teaching: having botched his first attempt at deployment, he never seemed to ask himself what errors he had made and how to correct those and try again. His followup to his truly brilliant Mindstorms was the embarrassing Children's Machine which is pretty much an embittered rant against the evils of School (capitalized as shown); much like Marx on capitalism he identifies its problems but fails to come up with a solution worth poop. And so his vision stumbled and fell at its first real hurdle.
That does not negate the vision itself, however; instead it serves as a cautionary tale that it is not enough to conceive a truly revolutionary idea, but also build the tools and channels necessary to communicate that idea correctly and completely to other people, most of all the people comfortably ensconsed in the status quo who benefit least from such radically disruptive change (parents, teachers, school boards, education departments, politicians, etc.) but without whose buy-in and support that disruption will not get off the ground at all.
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No doubt all the perfectly well-intentioned but also perfectly wrong idiots—the Scratch-ers, the "Learn to Code" movement, the RasPi-ers, etc.—will be falling over themselves to claim themselves the True Bearer's of Papert's legacy; but honestly they're all so far from being Not Even Wrong they aren't even fit to lick the mud from zombie Papert's toes when returns to chomp their brains in disgust at all the rank garbage they've sold.
And yet, all of Papert's brilliant ideas are still there for the taking; along with all his hard-won lessons of how not to turn them into a world-changing global success. If his little group could get as far as it did with the utterly pitiful computing and communication resources they had back then, imagine what a small group of genuine successors might yet build with the unimaginable wealth of cheap powerul hardware and planet-spanning internet available now. Thus Seymour Papert's real legacy lies not in what he did, but in the direction he set out for those who follow him: to pick up that original idea and run with it further; and keep on doing so until its vision of humanity as fearless and enthusiastic learners, thinkers, questioners, and creators finally wins through.
All it takes is a willingness to learn how to learn—and if 8-year-olds can do it, what's everyone else's excuse?
Algorithmic thinking is fatally overrated. Top-down deconstruction of complex problems is a trap into which generations of modern programmers endlessly fall, because all the algorithmic skills in the universe won't make up for a foundational ignorance of the problem domain. This is why so many modern business and government software systems royally suck: because the people—modern professional software engineers—who build them have zero knowledge or interest in learning the jobs those systems are meant to do.
What Logo taught was bottom-up constructionism, where you learn the problem space first though exploration and experimentation. As you go, you compose your own vocabulary of custom words to more efficiently describe it, until you've built up both your own understanding of the problem space and your own set of tools for working within it that you can start to construct solutions to the problems at hand.
For instance, if your task is to draw a city then you don't start by designing the finished roadmap with industrial, commercial, and residential zones, and the complete list of structures that should appear on each—because unless you're already an professional city planner you have zero knowledge or experience in how cities are structured or work. Instead, you start by learning the basics, such as how to construct a house using only the general-purpose primitives you get for free: lines and angles. Using only those, you can create your own words for drawing simple geometric shapes: rectangles, triangles, circles. You can then compose those into words for drawing the outline of a simple building (a rectangle with a triangle on top), a window (a grid of 4 rectangles), a door (a rectangle with a circle for doorknob).
Once you've got that vocabulary, you can very rapidly iterate a whole variety of words for drawing various shapes, sizes, and types of buildings, choosing to keep the words that work best and discarding the ones that don't. While you're learning how buildings are built, you can experiment with adding other kinds of words for drawing trees, park benches, traffic lights, and so on. And once you've built up your own "city-building" vocabulary, you can very rapidly experiment with different kinds of city structures and layouts to learn what works well and what doesn't, once again capturing the successful compositions as your own reusable words.
By the time you're done exploring this particular problem space, not only do you have a really good personal understanding of how cities are put together, you've also got an incredibly powerful—and shareable—language for building cities very quickly and efficiently. Thus your original problem requires only a little more top-down work to arrive at a complete solution. And then, if your first completed city isn't entirely to its inhabitants' taste, that same set of tools also enables you to rebuild it very quickly and easily as well; nothing is set in stone, and improvements made at one level automatically propagate to all subsequent levels as well. Or, you could even introduce them to some of the city-building vocabulary you've already created and let them adapt and enhance your initial cities for themselves.
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BTW, if this bottom-up approach sounds vaguely familiar to older programmers, that's because it is: it's exactly how Lisp and Forth systems build things (and Logo, which is a hybrid of the two). When the CS profession created Algol, it made a fatal error: it mistakenly declared Algol a general-gurpose language when it was, in fact, a Domain-Specific Language: a procedural number-crunching language specifically designed for the subset of computer users whose job was to write procedural number-crunching systems. And that broken thinking has been steadily baked in ever since—through, C, Pascal, C++, Java, Swift, Python, JavaScript, and so on.
So now we have generations of modern mainstream programmers who are experts in using incredibly complex, dumb, and limited "progr
From my computing desk, surrounded for Openstack hosts, 3PAR storage shelves and a few blade enclosures ...
Goodbye Seaymour, rest in peace. Your creation inspired me to pursuit a career on IT.
I'm still missing Max Beberman who created New Math and died in 1968.
Logo, changing sexuality everywhere!
Seymour Papert is a true hero for the fields of computer science and education. To hear him at a lecture was a true intelectual delight. We old-school programmers owe him a lot; I learned to program using Logo and now my son is learning to program using Scratch which is like a third-generation descendant of Logo. His books should be required reading for teachers of all levels and sorts.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
With a few exceptions, most of the comments here are about computer programming, not learning. I have been working through an ancient copy of Papert's book Mindstorms, which is more about teaching kids to think mathematically (he uses a different word, but same root). As a linguist, I found myself disagreeing part way through when he claimed that learning math was substantially the same as learning a (first) language. It isn't, IMHO.
Anyone else have comments about his more general contributions? Have they had an effect on schools anywhere (not just in the US)?
Back on programming: I also have a copy of "Exploring Language with Logo" by E. Paul Goldenberg and Wallace Feurzeig, which does an interesting job of exploring language using the Logo programming language. I don't think I would use Logo to teach linguistics nowadays, but there are lots of good ideas there that are really programming language agnostic. I wonder to what extent it was ever used for teaching language/ linguistics.