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The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

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Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#21

Post by crescentfresh »

jake-low wrote: post #19
WJW wrote: post #17

I remember my very first program, from the book "Programmeren voor kinderen" ("Programming for kids" in Dutch) repeat 4 forward 100 right 90 It drew a square on the screen and my mind was blown. I haven't recovered yet :)

If you don't mind me asking, did the book do any explaining of why the magic computer words were in a foreign language (English)? Had you been exposed to much English already when you picked up the book? As a native English speaker I feel fairly ignorant of how programming is taught in other (human) languages. I recall a quote [1] by Eric S. Raymond commenting (or perhaps speculating?) that Linus commented his kernel…

I always wondered how non-english speaking developers from other countries who were first adopters of HTTP (or any new tech) reacted to words like "GET" and "Content-Type" and other things that were clearly invented by westerners. What would we think if we had to implement something new and use words we didn't understand?

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#22

Post by dekhn »

pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #9

Summer 1981, 11 years old, learning logo on a ][. It sure beat the hell out of trying to draw a straight line in HIRES mode in assembly: goddamn skipping every six horizontal lines made no sense to my pre-teen brain that couldn't grok modulus.

TBH that HIRES mode still bothers me.

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#23

Post by Angostura »

thought_alarm wrote: post #3

The source code is 213 KB of ASCII, assembled on 1980-8-6. A souped-up Apple II at that time would have had 64 KB of RAM, and 140 KB of storage per floppy disk. I guess you needed a PDP-11 to do any real work in those days.

I bought a fantastic Logo implementation for the ZX-Spectrum. That must have fitted into well under 16K. I wish I could remember who produced it.

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#24

Post by reubenmorais »

jake-low wrote: post #19
WJW wrote: post #17

I remember my very first program, from the book "Programmeren voor kinderen" ("Programming for kids" in Dutch) repeat 4 forward 100 right 90 It drew a square on the screen and my mind was blown. I haven't recovered yet :)

If you don't mind me asking, did the book do any explaining of why the magic computer words were in a foreign language (English)? Had you been exposed to much English already when you picked up the book? As a native English speaker I feel fairly ignorant of how programming is taught in other (human) languages. I recall a quote [1] by Eric S. Raymond commenting (or perhaps speculating?) that Linus commented his kernel…

I'm not the GP, but here's my perspective learning programming in a 3-year technical high school program in Brazil (I had a little bit of exposure before, with Windows batch files and shell scripts).

We started with a language called Portugol or "structured Portuguese" which is something like a formalized pseudo-code language and was used to teach the basic concepts of structured programming: variables, control flow, subroutines.

We spent about three months working with Portugol exclusively, never actually running it on a computer, but just for understanding programming logic. After that we moved to C and eventually "C with classes" C++. Comments were still written in Portuguese.

The transition to C was fairly easy in my experience, because the actual English vocabulary you need to understand to program in C is very small, and because the concepts themselves were taught in Portuguese with Portugol, so you only had to do dictionary translation, really.

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#25

Post by mirkules »

crescentfresh wrote: post #21
jake-low wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, did the book do any explaining of why the magic computer words were in a foreign language (English)? Had you been exposed to much English already when you picked up the book? As a native English speaker I feel fairly ignorant of how programming is taught in other (human) languages. I recall a quote [1] by Eric S. Raymond commenting (or perhaps speculating?) that Linus commented his kernel…

I always wondered how non-english speaking developers from other countries who were first adopters of HTTP (or any new tech) reacted to words like "GET" and "Content-Type" and other things that were clearly invented by westerners. What would we think if we had to implement something new and use words we didn't understand?

I can tell you a similar anectode. My family used to live in a eastern Europe communist-at-the-time country. Computers were hard to come by and the only place you could get good hardware was in Germany.

My dad went to Germany and bought an Atari (I forget which one exactly), and realized it was all in German. Seeing that he didn't know any German, he learned it enough to navigate the UI.

In other words, the time cost of learning German was less than the cost of the computer + the trip to Germany. Basically necessity.

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#26

Post by WorldMaker »

reubenmorais wrote: post #24
jake-low wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, did the book do any explaining of why the magic computer words were in a foreign language (English)? Had you been exposed to much English already when you picked up the book? As a native English speaker I feel fairly ignorant of how programming is taught in other (human) languages. I recall a quote [1] by Eric S. Raymond commenting (or perhaps speculating?) that Linus commented his kernel…

I'm not the GP, but here's my perspective learning programming in a 3-year technical high school program in Brazil (I had a little bit of exposure before, with Windows batch files and shell scripts). We started with a language called Portugol or "structured Portuguese" which is something like a formalized pseudo-code language and was used to teach the basic concepts of structured programming: variables, control flow,…

Seems a shame that there wasn't a Portugol interpreter/compiler handy to at least see things running on a machine before moving to C. Probably would have been a good class assignment to more advanced students to build something like that.

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#27

Post by DonHopkins »

Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64 came with a 6502 assembler written in Logo by Leigh Klotz, that they used to write Logo primitives (for controlling the turtle, etc).

It would be ambitious to make a self hosting 6502 Logo meta assembler, by porting the entire 6502 assembly language Logo source code to the 6502 Logo Assembler!

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#28

Post by DonHopkins »

WJW wrote: post #17

I remember my very first program, from the book "Programmeren voor kinderen" ("Programming for kids" in Dutch) repeat 4 forward 100 right 90 It drew a square on the screen and my mind was blown. I haven't recovered yet :)

I fear the generation who learned Computer Science from Sesame Street and The Young Ones.

https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/sesame-street.html

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#29

Post by jrd259 »

Note there were two versions of Logo for the Apple II. The other was developed by Logo Computer Systems Inc. (I was one of the staff). Our version was written first in Lisp (on Lisp Machines) then manually compiled to assembler. The Lisp development environment included a full 6502 emulator, allowing the developers to execute Logo either at the Lisp level (fast) or to drop down into the instruction level (slow). The emulator also emulated the Apple II's graphics.

Re: The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found

#30

Post by DonHopkins »

MicahKV wrote: post #7

Wow, what a blast from the past. My introduction to programming was on an old Apple II with BASIC and LOGO. I was in the 6th grade at the time, and never did anything as complex as looping to draw spirals - I basically used LOGO like an etch-a-sketch.

Alan Kay was quite inspired by a groundbreaking game series called "Thinkin' Things," which had a visual blocks programming language for controlling and drawing colorful patterns with marching bands, football players, and cheerleaders: "Let's build a halftime show"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8&feature=youtu.be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423719

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...

>Alan Kay on "Etoys, Alice and tile programming": "This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system."

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