

Forward 40: Where is LOGO?  - nickb
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/forward-40-wher.html

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zaidf
Oh man! All through elementary school in India, we were taught in every single
class that "LOGO is the language of the computer". This was about 12 years
ago.

I didn't really like the computer or programming much back then and almost
flunked the LOGO exam. That just goes to say how cool the language is--I went
into the exam clueless but after typing a few "LEFT" and "RIGHT" I was amazed
it did exactly what you ask it to.

~~~
zaidf
To the poor soul who likes to down-mod every comment I post, hope life gets
better!

~~~
MuddyMo
zaidf, you are wise, my friend.

To have compassion for such a person is unique and uncommon. I join you in
hoping life does get better for that person, because it must be so very sad to
be in trapped in such a life.

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oditogre
I never liked LOGO. It was just one of the programs available for us to play
with during 'computer lab time', and as far as I can remember we were never
taught how to use it; commands were passed on in a sort of oral tradition from
older schoolmates to younger. Since then, I've learned how cool it can really
be and wondered about it often, though. Anybody know of a good, true-to-the-
old-school-basic-program that's freeware for Win32?

*Edit: And while I'm at it with old games and such that I miss...anybody know where I can get ahold of a BASIC with the old nibbles.bas and gorilla.bas that came with QBASIC?

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iamwil
Logo hasn't disappeared, though it's evolved a bit. Northwestern University
has a version of Logo called NetLogo.

<http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/>

It's a decentralized version of logo, where you can control multiple turtles
at once. It's useful in simulating distributed systems, such as "turtles,
termites, and traffic jams."

There's a book by Mitchel Resnick by the same name.
[http://books.google.com/books?id=K8P1rX8T4kYC&dq=turtles...](http://books.google.com/books?id=K8P1rX8T4kYC&dq=turtles+termites+traffic+jams&pg=PP1&ots=xjELl6ou14&sig=vbEYZIfpZuAgy9oWsx4zEEn0VbE&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dturtles%2Btermites%2Btraffic%2Bjams%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26aq%3Dt%26rls%3Dcom.ubuntu:en-
US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-
thumbnail)

If you get a chance, run some of the simulations on their demo page. They're
available as java applets. It's pretty amazing to see complex patterns stem
from simple interactions, also a theme of Wolfram.

~~~
Tichy
I went to a Summer School in Collective Intelligence this year, and chose
Netlogo to implement a project. It was definitely fun: quite messy., but you
really could get an experiment up and running very quickly. In fact most teams
chose Netlogo for their experiments.

So Logo is alive ;-)

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sspencer
The article mentions Oregon Trail as another classic app that changed lives at
a young age -- this is dead on. I remember playing Oregon Trail during
"computer time" as young as 2nd grade (about 8 years old) and wondering how
the computer translated my keyboard input into what to display on the screen.
And thus, a future hacker's curiosity is piqued.

If only my family didn't die of dysentery so often...

~~~
icey
Hahah all Oregon Trail prepped me for was Castle Wolfenstein. I'd spend all my
money on bullets and hope I could find some buffalo to strafe.

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mdemare
I'm not a big fan of LOGO either. Drawing lines gets boring quickly.

I'm reminded of picking a university. I went to two introductory CS courses.

One had us drawing Mickey Mouse in Pascal on a old Mac, which gave me a deep
hatred of Apple that lasted until I discovered OSX.

The other was an introduction to MINIX. And the end, we all received a disk
with MINIX on it. I didn't even know at the time that there were alternatives
to MS-DOS, and was deeply impressed.

Moral: Don't be condescending to kids - it's better to overestimate them. And
LOGO is a condescending language.

~~~
Shorel
No, it is not.

Some LOGO books are, but the language is not. I tried reading 'Turtle
Geometry' when I was young. Some parts are like University Maths. In fact, all
of it is very strict in the mathematical sense. And all is based on LOGO. For
someone in high school who had no idea of trigonometry, it was mind blowing.

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joe_fishfish
In my school we had a mechanical turtle that drew lines on a big piece of
paper on the floor. If you were really good and didn't mess around with your
screen turtle you got to have a go at using it. We had to stop using it when
someone gave it the command FORWARD 500 and it pulled its own cable out of the
computer. Good times.

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far33d
I will never forget programming an animated rocket that blasts off in my 3rd
grade glass... Logo is great.

~~~
far33d
And then writing Logo as a project my soph year.... ah, the full circle of
education.

