I have fond memories learning about Logo from Mr. Wizard!

I myself learned programming with logo, at my school when I was 8 or 10. And it was a delight, I am so grateful it existed.

But quite surprisingly, when later during my Ph.D. part of my time was dedicated to give exercises to students. And we used logo instead of the more usual programming languages. And I think it really helped them to really internalise programming a lot better. Typically, the latest exercices introduced recursion which is immediately visible as fractals.

    HIDETURTLE
    
    PENUP
    SETXY -200 0
    RIGHT 90
    PENDOWN
    
    to dragon :degree :size
        setpensize 1
        if :size>5  [setpensize 2]
        if :size>10 [setpensize 3]
        if :size>20 [setpensize 4]
        if :size>40 [setpensize 5]
        ifelse :degree=0 [
            fd :size
        ][
            left  45 dragon (:degree-1) (size/4)
            right 90 dragon (:degree-1) (size/2)
            left  90 dragon (:degree-1) (size/4)
            right 45
        ]
    end
    
    dragon 6 3000

if you want to give a try :)

For many years, our students[0] have used Logo as an integral part of their math circle-style[1] classes. When we started Wally Feurzeig, one of the creators of Logo, was instrumental in helping us incorporate ideas from Logo into the kind of non-standard problem solving that we were striving for. Turtle geometry is a particularly helpful "instrument of the mind" for exploring dynamic geometry. Our co-founder, Victor Gutenmacher, wrote an incredible book[2] on "geometry in motion," which gave a completely different perspective on geometry from the one seen in school and which our students could explore with the help of Logo. For many of our students, especially those with math anxiety, Logo was what enabled them to overcome that anxiety and discover the joy of thinking and tinkering. Many programmers today have fond memories of getting into programming via Logo, but I would argue that despite the current blistering pace of progress, it remains one of the best and gentlest introductions to problem solving and computational thinking.

[0] https://www.gentleknowledge.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_circle

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0817641610

I'm forever grateful for having the access to Logo programming in early 90s, as a kid from a 3rd world country, for how it leads to where I am today.

My first ever english word that I can spell out is REPEAT.

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.

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

This is on top of HN right now, and there is still nobody who has mentioned the fact that the tier-1 book Turtle Geometry <https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/4663/Turtle-Geomet...> , is in open access.

Do yourself a favor, and read it today : it is that good. Even though it is quite depressing to see that the revolution in education that the book was predicting in its preface, simply never happened.

Logo was created by by Seymour Papert. I highly recommend his book Mindstorms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) It was written in 1980 but could have mostly been written today. All the same issues with teachers misunderstandings and fear of math and technology and refusal to change to meet the challenges of the age.

My favorite logo on macOS is https://www.alancsmith.co.uk/logo/ First dabbled with logo on my apple ][, attracted by turtle graphics like many others.

Kicked off so many memories...

Early 80's I learned Logo and Basic at a local store that sold Apple computers. It was called "The Logical Choice" and had a classroom tucked away behind a false wall and an English Sheep dog "Sir Isaac Newton" that would hang around the store!

Nice, I just found a story on the store, page 5 of [1].

[1] https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...

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

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.

I'm not seeing any shout-outs to MSWLogo! I loved being able to create dialog boxes and UIs!

Also, The Great Logo Adventure is a great book for kids learning Logo. It's what I learned with, and it's available as a free PDF now!

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?

LCSI LogoWriter for 68k Macs[0] was my shit. It was my first[1] introduction to programming in elementary school and I spent hours trying to make games with it. There were 4 turtles and you could treat them like sprites; you give them custom shapes and colours, and there were basic collision detection primitives. You could also check for collisions with the background by querying the colour under a turtle. You could play and record your own sounds... spent so much time with that little round Apple microphone[2] recording goofy sound effects.

[0] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6717-logo-writer-2-0

[1] technically I had used the Apple II version a couple times first

[2] https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/macintosh-to-p...

Logo is a real surprise if you revisit it as a grown professional. Remarkably elegant language.

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

As a child, I really enjoyed Logo. It appeared as a sidebar on a math textbook about angles and line segments. I studied it like I studied everything else in the textbook, but I didn’t immediately realize it was a programming language, a means to control a computer. Fast forward a few years in elementary school, when the teacher actually began to teach Logo with all students in front of a computer, it was such a profound revelation for me.

During the second Logo class, the teacher set up a competition. A prize was to be given to the student who could first plot an equilateral triangle, a square, a regular pentagon, a regular hexagon, etc, up to a regular icosagon. I won the prize because I wrote formulas to make the computer do the angle computation. I was so so proud of myself compared to my classmates who were computing angles with pen and paper. It felt like the first inkling of the power of automation.

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.

It’s 1998, I’m 10, it’s a gloomy autumn morning, in Klaipeda (pop. 200k), Lithuania, eastern Europe. I’m at school. Informatics class. Never touched a computer before.

The computer is running windows 95. The teacher starts Logo and I see that turtle in the middle of the screen. She explains how to make it move.

And I start typing my very first code.

It’s lisp based. Took me 28 years to learn that. Now I think I need to finish the job and pock up lisp.

They taught us Logo at school in the early 90s in Lima, Peru. I'll never forget the aha moment of going from "forward 10, left 90" to "repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]" and bam a circle! They had us bring a formatted 5in floppy disk (they were indeed floppy) to our first class; what was this sorcery?

Didn't notice it as a kid but Logo is an absolute masterpiece if you think about raw impact on the IT world.

70 comments here and they're basically all positive about Logo being formative

I had a great teacher in primary school who introduced us to programming with Logo. We ran a variant called MSWLogo - it was my gateway drug, and how I learned what "paisley" was. Good times!

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.

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

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.

Good old days in my school in Russia. Logo was the first programming language we've been taught back in the 90s.

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

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.

I used to get in trouble for making it play various noises of increasing hilarity via the inbuilt speaker . Always in bother but learned a lot and lots of fun!

I have fond memories of using Logo on my dad's Apple ][ back in the 80's. Glad to see others feel the same!

There was an excellent fully featured version of Logo for the ZxSpectrum that got me hooked.

Came for the graphics, stayed for the recursion and string handling

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

Logo is in my heart forever. The first PL I was introduced to and made me love programming for life. It was MSW Logo if I’m not mistaken and that turtle was a lot of fun.

One of the first interesting programs I made was LOGO in flash (actionscript) :D It's a great tool for learning basic programming since it's interactive, graphical, and simple.

I'm not going to thrash my first programming language, but do "kids" nowadays start with Scratch or something like that?

I consider Logo an undeservedly forgotten technology that showed the world a glimpse of what computerized education really is, and Seymour Papert is a misunderstood genius ahead of his time.

The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.

Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.

Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".

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.

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.

Dr Logo: https://winworldpc.com/product/dr-logo/1x

Logo in either elementary or middle school in the early 00's was my first experience writing any code. Good times.

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

Logo unit testing supports a mock turtle.

this is so nostalgic. I remember going to my School's Computer Lab and trying to draw circles and then later some stars and stuff. so cool

So I know a Lisp dialect? Fascinating.

SVG paths are basically LOGO programs.

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

I can’t read this website. The white text has insufficient contrast in the menus and the lightweight text is too thin!

It's turtles all the way down

my first programming language!

Logo was the first programming language I ever learned. I was in third grade in Seattle, Washington, around 1989, and I absolutely loved it. Looking back, not hard to see that it was responsible for sparking a lifelong love of technology and programming.

TThe only reason we got to learn it at all was because one of the daycare workers was a graduate student at the University of Washington. She somehow got permission for any of the kids who were interested to use the school's computer lab. Which, I think, took some doing on her part.

Back then, computers were treated like sacred objects. They made a huge deal about kids using them. The whole first week of the class was basically some grumpy old guy with a white beard telling us, "These are not toys! These are expensive machines!"

We had to wash our hands before we were allowed into the computer room. The old guy would literally "hand check" us at the door. You had to hold out your hands and show him that they were clean before you were allowed anywhere near the computers.

Logo was a lot of fun. We had a competition to see who could draw the coolest thing. Just like foundation for a "hackathon" really. Every day, "OK, Kids, you have 30 minutes, let's see what you can do!" Was a lot of fun.

I had to ask my mom for a floppy disk. "Mom, I need $5 for class supplies..." And then I had to explain that it was for a computer disk... and she had to call the school to make sure I was getting the right thing... even though I told her 100 times that I needed an un-formatted 5.25" disk! Ha.

Anyway good memories here. Logo and HyperCard were gateway drugs.

We used Logo on Apple IIs quite a bit in the 80s but I don't have fond memories because Logo is one of those things that at the time when using it one had no idea (and neither did the teachers teaching it) that there was something of much more substance behind it than just drawing lines and circles on the screen. Which was frankly kind of boring. We'd get as far as simple procedures but that's it.

There's a whole Lispy beauty behind the language that teachers didn't know how to transmit to the kids because they themselves didn't understand it. The emphasis on turtle graphics was limiting.

Not to be confused with NetLogo ;)

https://www.netlogo.org/

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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...