History of Logo

The following post is a couple years old, but maybe somebody can provide some updates and recent info!

Edit: I should have RTFA first, which is totally up to date, just published in 2020, from the turtle's mouth:

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3

>Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch

>In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teachingStructure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403

DonHopkins on July 23, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Ask HN: Best Lego Mindstorms alternative for fun p...

One of the coolest ways to learn programming I've ever seen is the Snap! visual programming language, which is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. https://snap.berkeley.edu

It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems.

Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc).

Y Combinator demo:

https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Usern...

Here's an excellent mind-blowing example by Ken Kahn of what's possible: teaching kids AI programming by integrating Snap! with existing JavaScript libraries and cloud services like AI, machine learning, speech synthesis and recognition, Arduino programming, etc:

AI extensions of Snap! for the eCraft2Learn project

https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/

>The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project.

https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai

http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-ser...

Use devices with Snap!:

Orbotix Sphero guide by Connor Hudson and Dan Garcia:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjI...

Lego NXT package by Connor Hudson:

https://github.com/technoboy10/snap-nxt

Nintendo Wiimote package by Connor Hudson:

https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap

Finch and Hummingbird robots package by Tom Lauwers:

https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap-programming/

Parallax S2 robot package by Connor Hudson:

https://github.com/blockext/s2

LEAP Motion by Connor Hudson:

https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion

Speech synthesis by Connor Hudson:

https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech

Arduino package by Alan Yorinks:

https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm

Arduino package by Bernat Romagosa/Citilab:

http://snap4arduino.rocks/

Fischertechnik ROBOTICS TXT Controller by Richard Kunze:

https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo-snap

Snap! for Raspberry Pi by rasplay.org:

http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/

More Snap! extensions for CS education:

snap-apps.org provides Edgy for graphs, Cellular for multi-agent simulation, and more.

http://snap-apps.org/

http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html

http://www.flipt.org/#cellular

Netsblox for multiplayer networking.

https://netsblox.org/

(One kid talking to another, with dad in the background hunched over an Apple ][.)

"Daddy's playing Pascal. That's where you try and see how many dots you can get before it beeps and you say nasty words."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvE...

Just a couple highlights from a detailed history of Logo that Brian and Leigh and others posted:

>From Brian Harvey:

>Many, many people have been involved in the development of Logo.

>Wally Feurzeig started the whole thing by organizing a group at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc., to study the educational effects of teaching kids a programming language. The first language they used, like most programming languages, was focused on numeric computation, and it was Wally's idea that kids would find it more natural to work in an area they knew better, namely natural language; therefore, he set up a team to design a language featuring words and sentences. Wally made up the name "Logo."

>The team Wally put together at BBN included Seymour Papert and Dan Bobrow. The three of them are credited as the designers of the first version of the language; Dan wrote the first implementation. In a BBN report dated August, 1967, credit for additional work is given to Richard Grant, Cynthia Solomon, and Frank Frazier.

>Seymour later started a Logo group at MIT, where Logo development continued. The MIT versions of Logo were substantially different from the BBN ones, both in the notations used and in the things the language could do. Most notably, turtle graphics was added at MIT.

>Among the many people who contributed to the development of Logo at MIT, at the risk of leaving someone out, are Hal Abelson, Paul Goldenberg, Dan Watt, Gary Drescher, Steve Hain, Leigh Klotz, Andy diSessa, Brian Silverman... oh, lots of people.

>I think that most of the early documents are out of print now, but whatever documentation there is of the early efforts will be in the form of technical reports from BBN and from MIT. You may have to visit Cambridge to find them!

>From Leight Klotz:

>In the mid 1970's, when the AI Lab Lisp Machine project was just getting underway, Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis (later to found Terrapin, and still later, Thinking Machines) put together a project to build a Logo machine. It had two components: a PDP-11 processor (the 3500) and a separate vector-graphics display (the 2500). Guy Montpetit, a Canadian entrepeneur, funded development eventually, and a company called General Turtle was formed. General Turtle built and sold the 2500/3500 system. Henry Minsky, then about 12, worked on the design of the 2500, using the Stanford Draw program, one of the early electronics CAD systems. (The 2500 had this really great barrell shifter stolen from the Lisp machine design, but it was later found not to work, so it was never used.) [...]

>[...] Like Brian, I've left out many people who worked on Logo over the years: Brian Fox and Flavio Rose worked for me at Terrapin on a contract basis briefly, as did vagabond programmer Devon McCullough (who used to dial in with a 300 baud modem he'd written in entirely software using the parallel game port, with an 80-column mixed-case display done with 3x5 pixel characters; when the modem detected the call waiting click on the line, it would make the Apple II speaker make the telephone ringing sound -- a feature which I just saw a US patent filed on, not by Devon.), and the frustrated Sinclar QX programmer, who I suspect doesn't want his name used. Of course, there were tons more people at the AI Lab in the pre-commercial days...

>From Lars Brinkhoff

>Hello,

>I'm mostly researching PDP-10 software, especially MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System.

>I have recently stumbled across some of the LOGO group work. I have a copy of the Dazzle Dart game that ran on their PDP-11/45. It uses the Tom Knight vector display controller, so it's not easy to run it.

>Maybe it would be possible to get the original MIT PDP-11 LOGO running.

>[...] It's running now.

>[...] Now also BBN PDP-10 Logo, MIT CLOGO, MIT Lisp Logo, and hopefully soon MIT Apple II Logo (direct ancestor of Terrapin Apple II Logo).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs