> "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world."
Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway...
> "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages."
If anyone is interested in this, there are the following books:
It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve, and I find it a bit sad that many kids are getting introduced to programming via something like Python or Scratch. I feel there's still space for Logo, and it would be cool to see an easily downloadable and installable version of it.
Yeah. I recommend it because it goes way beyond the stuff another commenter complained about in this thread:
> A dozen articles about the language, with listings. The screenshots? All the same, showing recursive pictures of rectangles and circles. Great. LOGO can do that. But what else? Big empty void there.
E.g. the last chapter is an intro to general relativity, with a simulator for motion in curved spacetime.
(CS Logo Style also covers many topics, but it looked like they were all familiar to me as an experienced programmer. I haven't seen another book for programmers about most of the math in Turtle Geometry.)
Take a look at that issue of BYTE entirely dedicated to LOGO that was referenced multiple times in this discussion.
A dozen articles about the language, with listings. The screenshots? All the same, showing recursive pictures of rectangles and circles. Great. LOGO can do that. But what else? Big empty void there.
Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOGO died out and BASIC thrived?
> Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOGO died out and BASIC thrived?
AIUI, implementations of BASIC on home computers were a lot simpler and more straightforward than LOGO or LISP - for instance, GC in BASIC was an afterthought and only applied to strings. The real competitor to BASIC back then was FORTH.
What could Basic do over Logo? As a few of the books I posted show, Logo is a very capable language, ignoring turtles. Was Logo in the 80s somehow less capable?
Despite the heritage of the creators, I personally view Scratch as a misstep. I am a big fan of visual programming, but Scratch is essentially an everyday imperative language with a structured editor and sprites. It doesn't maintain any of the simplicity or elegance of Logo or Lisp, and I'm honestly a bit surprised that the MIT Media Lab invests so much in it.
Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway...
> "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages."
If anyone is interested in this, there are the following books:
* Exploring Language with Logo: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262570653
* Visual Modeling with Logo: A Structured Approach to Seeing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262530694
* Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics: https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificia...
* Computer Science Logo Style: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html
It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve, and I find it a bit sad that many kids are getting introduced to programming via something like Python or Scratch. I feel there's still space for Logo, and it would be cool to see an easily downloadable and installable version of it.