I had the strangest experience with Logo in junior high. The computer class taught people some basic drawing commands -- going forward, turning left and right, moving the virtual pen up and down, etc. -- but for some reason banned us from using any commands that were "too advanced", by which they meant anything beyond the basic drawing primitives. The thing is, the whole point of Logo is to make thing like looping and conditionals visually intuitive and fun. A the time it was frustrating; in retrospect it's also farcical. Such a waste!
I ran into that problem taking a Basic class in high school. I think it boiled down to the teacher didn't know much more than what he was presenting, so he didn't want us to jump ahead.
Fortunately we had the opposite. We had pascal and C classes until my senior year, when she started offering Visual Basic (which she was learning as she went). At the time QB then VB was my thing (I was working on multiplayer games using winsock controls), so she would ask me questions if someone went beyond her knowledge.
That’s heartwarming. Although the ideal would be for your teacher to know everything and be able to offer expert guidance, what she actually did was the next best thing and I salute her for it.
I had a teacher that made (forced) us to do tables in wordperfect (windows version) with - and | because thats the way he had always done it. He banned me from talking in his course because I was explaining to others how to do things properly.
I wonder how many people’s learning has been held back because a teacher was too prideful to say the words “I don’t know” and then suggest looking it up.
Unfortunately too many and it is still the case. France can't hire teachers, can't keep the ones it has and continues to force young unexperimented ones into the harshest areas. In US it is not better, most are only some kind of test preparers and discipline managers...
I agree 100% with the author -- logo as a child is what started me on programming. My first programming experience was in ~1981 or so when my elementary school teacher brought an Apple II into our classroom. She was getting her MS in education, and it was on-loan from her college. It was loaded with Apple Logo, and you had to pry me away from it with a crowbar. That was one of the first times I stayed after school willingly. I hounded my parents mercilessly until they finally bought an Apple II clone.
I eventually learned BASIC, and learned debugging and "hacking" by fixing the games that I typed in (incorrectly) from magazines and modifying them to do different things.
> Logo gave me a brief taste of functional programming even though back then I did not know the term "functional programming".
This is what Unix pipes did for me. By the time I started programming constructing programs as series of side effect-free transformations felt perfectly natural (to be precise I did have some previous imperative programming experience and I didn't like it / grok it)
In those days we had no internet. There were no books about LOGO programming in the library.
The math teacher taught us the basic commands, but didn't explain the REPEAT command so we could understand and the importance of it. So I had no examples to follow or a real mentor to suggest a book. Later I learned some basic Pascal, but it was only in high school when I taught myself programming in C++.
Logo, then moving on to Basic on the VTech Pre-Computer 1000, then GW-BASIC on PC (which to this day I never figured out how to exit! I used to turn the computer off and on again)
I also struggled with this for awhile... Can't remember how have I figured it out at the end. I was programming in Forth before, so I even tried BYE :)
This seems a pretty common thing, to have a pleasant nostalgic memory of Logo as a fun introduction to programming. My experience with it was pretty different - I found it pretty pointless and boring at the time, and it didn't have any pull on me the way C later did.
Ironically, a big part of what made C fun for me were the Borland conio (console I/O) and graphics libraries. But those were fun only because I could respond to user interactions, and make simple games and other playful things. Looking back on it, that was probably the missing ingredient with Logo for me - we were never taught any ways of user input, they were just static programs that did one thing, and that feels fundamentally different.
We had a LOGO turtle at school in the late 80s I guess? I can’t remember if it was hooked up to the BBC Micros or the RM Nimbus pseudo-PC that were popular in UK schools at the time. But either way, it seemed amazingly cool.
If you'd like to play around with a 3D implementation of Logo, check out https://turtlespaces.org -- there's a webassembly build that runs in the browser with a Javascript IDE, and compiled application versions for Windows, macOS and Linux
There are also web implementations like https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ or https://turtleacademy.com/ which kids love to play with (and I'll admit is fun for us adults too!) The fern example in particular is surprisingly beautiful.
My first programming language (aside from HP-12C routines) was COMAL on the C64. COMAL was advertised as being halfway between BASIC and PASCAL, and it also had LOGO turtle graphics commands and featured a corresponding split screen text/graphics view. Great times.
