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Logo Programming Language

79 points azhenley 2 days ago 33 comments

lackoftactics 1 hour ago | parent

I didn't win logo programming competition in polish equivalent of 7th grade and I am still salty about it

Tade0 1 hour ago | parent

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.

lackoftactics 1 hour ago | parent

same problem, it wasn't exaclty the best experience with first programming language

knome 14 minutes ago | parent

ha. 4th grade for me, though I'm more amused than salty about the affair. who's ever heard of 'recursion'? honestly.

lackoftactics 11 minutes ago | parent

tbh, sounds like a made-up term coined by someone who could go on and on

mococa 1 hour ago | parent

I learned how to program (& do CAD) with LOGO when I was 8 y'old.

animateus 1 hour ago | parent

Oh my god - Logo, brings back memories of my childhood and my first "microcomputer": ZX Spectrum +. I spent countless hours trying to force the damn turtle to draw shapes I wanted it to. Unbelievable that this language is still alive.

fipar 45 minutes ago | parent

Same for me but on the Spectrum's illegitimate South American cousin, the TK-90X :)

The language is still alive but I think Scratch has mostly taken its place.

wooperville 1 hour ago | parent

The majority of GenX programmers I know learned logo in the 70s and early 80s. Such a great introductory language.

joeypickles 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, somehow I owe my entire software engineering career to that flower and garden program example. There was something about being able to add new words based on primitives, and new words based on custom words, that captured me for good.

ihumanable 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Xirdus 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

corysama 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Towaway69 1 hour ago | parent

Not to be confused with NetLogo ;)

https://www.netlogo.org/

Night_Thastus 38 minutes ago | parent

Are they totally unrelated?

stusmall 1 hour ago | parent

Logo started my love of programming. I will always be thankful for it and that little turtle. IIRC there was a limit of 128 stamps in LogoWriter and my sister and I would fight so much about it.

tshapedrob 1 hour ago | parent

Berkeley Logo was one of my first programming languages. The idea of declaring functions with the keyword “to” still feels like a fun and good idea, even though of course it doesn’t matter. Just a different perspective.

Duanemclemore 1 hour ago | parent

When I was seven I wrote my first program. It was in Terrapin Logo and evenly tiled the monitor of my elementary school's Apple IIe with hexagons.

It's been all downhill since.

JSR_FDED 26 minutes ago | parent

Turtles all the way down?

mschaef 55 minutes ago | parent

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.

https://mschaef.com/c64

r2ob 41 minutes ago | parent

Logo was my first contact with computer (pc 386)

agumonkey 48 minutes ago | parent

iirc logo had lambda and recursion, which means a lot of kids in the 80s were that close to become lispers

Jtsummers 42 minutes ago | parent

Logo was directly inspired by Lisp and the first implementation was even written in Lisp.

spider-mario 46 minutes ago | parent

Could we please not make text light grey on white? It’s just barely AA compliant when bolded.

https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=96...

haunter 36 minutes ago | parent

This has to be one of the most widely ported language of them all because there are countless implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)#Im...

310 versions!! https://pavel.it.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/logotree/pdf/LogoTree.pdf

azhenley 34 minutes ago | parent

I’d say Lisp, Logo, and Basic as the top 3.

How come no one makes dialects of PHP?? :)

mezzman 22 minutes ago | parent

It's turtles all the way down

HexDecOctBin 13 minutes ago | parent

I learnt that I must be good at computers when in 4th grade, despite never having touched a PC before, I not only managed to ace my Logo class but was asked by my teacher to help out other struggling students (I am just realising that essentially made me a TA in our class). I still remember trying to understand the Pen Up and Pen Down commands from a book with no immediate access to a PC to try them on.

juancn 7 minutes ago | parent

Logo in Spanish in a C128 when I was in third grade started my journey in software.

After a while I was running laps around my teachers and I knew computers were for me.

lormayna 6 minutes ago | parent

I remember one of my professor that created a map of all Italian regions in logo. It was probably 1992.

consumer451 6 minutes ago | parent

Anyone here remember a 1980's Logo-programmable robot that I once used in a TAG program? It had a pen, we would lay it on top of a giant sheet of paper.

It was like a little futuristic tank. I searched for a minute, and I cannot find the exact model. Did I imagine this?

thought_alarm 3 minutes ago | parent

This on-line version of Logo is pretty great: https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/