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History of Logo

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Re: History of Logo

#81

Post by toontalk »

DonHopkins wrote: post #61
bharvey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words both about Logo and about Snap!. That article is in fact not yet officially published, but if I'm reading the ACM legalbol correctly, authors are allowed to put an "author's last draft" version on their institutions' web archives, so that's what you found. The article has eight authors, and of course the time required to write something is \Theta(n^2) in the number of authors, so it was a lo…

Hey, how about throwing in a perverted, fetishistic, masochistic programming language like FORTH, too? ;) Where do you think Logo and Snap fit into the three basic mental structures of psychosis, perversion, and neurosis, as W Watson describes in "The Pervert's Guide to Programming Languages"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22910702 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/…

Regarding hysterical languages and aesthetics there is the school of thought that small yet very expressive kernels are the most aesthetic. I recall a discussion in the early 1980s with Alan Perlis who claimed APL was a diamond and Lisp was a ball of mud. But it is easier to make things out of mud than diamonds. I also recall a discussion with Seymour Papert (circa 2005) about the next generation Logo. He claimed that one first needs to decide if the design should be driven by engineering or mathematical aesthetics. Sadly, there never was much progress designing the next Logo.

People's taste in programming languages is coloured by their first language(s). But Logo was designed to be a first language, so it shouldn't suffer from people's expectations that it do things like other languages.

Re: History of Logo

#82

Post by DonHopkins »

klotz wrote: post #79
DonHopkins wrote: post #64

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! Leigh, wasn't the assembler that you used for the original Apple ][ version of Logo wr…

Quite the resource list, Don! You should put in links to the Adventure game you wrote for the C64 Logo, and we listed you by name and age. The assembler was already chosen, probably by Steve Hain or Gary Drescher. I believe it was CROSS. It annoyed me that I would get phase errors if I edited during the first pass which was like 10 or 15 minutes at night so I wrote a one-pass assembler in MacLisp, but it was slower t…

So CROSS made you so cross that you crossed the line by rewriting it in MacLisp, then double crossed it by rewriting it in Logo itself!

Logo Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo

When I was 17, Terrapin published my first commercial code on their C64 Logo utilities disk: a Logo Adventure program, a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo’s list processing and functional programming capabilities.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrap...

Re: History of Logo

#83

Post by zvr »

tingletech wrote: post #47
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #46

Off topic: This site has a very nice UI. No frills. Almost soothing. Now i have to read that, and the rest of the site has moved to the top of my Tsundoku stack because of that. Does anybody else feel like that, too?

Thanks! My group at work produces that site [0], and our design group [1] worked on the UI too. [0] https://cdlib.org/services/pad/ [1] https://cdlib.org/services/uxdesign/

Congrats to both your group and your design group!

Re: History of Logo

#84

Post by timbit42 »

catketch wrote: post #34

This was an interesting read. I grew up with early personal computers of the eighties and in the geographic area described in the history, so a lot of it is nostalgic. At that time, programming on early home computers generally meant using BASIC (and maybe poke’ing some assembly code) before getting into “real” languages like pascal, Fortran and c in college. I remember thinking logo was a ‘baby’ language and only fo…

Yes, REBOL was created by Carl Sassenrath, a fan of Lisp, who after writing much of the Amiga operating system, wrote Amiga Logo and then REBOL.

Re: History of Logo

#85

Post by mimixco »

klotz wrote: post #77
mimixco wrote: post #3

LOGO changed my life! When I learned it as a kid, it made me realize that software was "castles in the sky" and you could do anything you want. 41 years later and a career programmer, I'm now using Lisp in our most modern product. :-) I'll always be grateful to Papert for his work in creating and teaching LOGO.

Which version of Logo and which Lisp? Have you read SICP? Hal Abelson is responsible for getting Logo out of MIT and into the world of the Apple II, and with GJS for SICP. Logo and Lisp connections go way back though, to it's inception with BBN and MIT people.

As a kid, the library had a TI-99/4A with its LOGO and a book by Papert included. I remember it had the most documentation of any piece of software for the machine, which intrigued me. They also had a Coleco ADAM that had LOGO, too, so I used both.

Today, we use SBCL to power a Lisp backend for our product that communicates with an Electron HTML/JS frontend via WebSockets. (See Nebula[0])

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043417

Re: History of Logo

#86

Post by mimixco »

kjs3 wrote: post #40
zozbot234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was it easier to explain to a kid "repeat 4 [forward 50 right 50]" or a bunch of memory pokes and all the boilerplate required to get an assembly language program to do anything. One would think that there's a useful middle ground. My favorite approach would be a FORTHy, postfix-based language where you'd write something like [|50 fd 90 rt] 4 repeat. Something like that would be comparatively easy to implement usin…

I think Logo is a useful middle ground for novice programmers. But by all means, if you want to do Forth, do Forth. Then you can have all the advantages of the Forth peanut gallery telling any kid that doesn't get Forth they're too stupid to understand computers and all the other toxic baggage that comes from that ecosystem. Or you can teach a language that caters to programming novices and let them decide if they wa…

I concur. The takeaway from LOGO is the idea about what computers can do and how you, the programmer, might approach that. It's a language designed for pedagogy. Programming in LOGO isn't about the language -- or any language, really.

Having done exactly as you say, go down to bare metal programming at IBM and up to full stack web stuff with multiple layers of "high level" languages, its really one's conception of computing that is the biggest determinant in the kinds of software one can write. It's not the tools themselves.

Re: History of Logo

#87

Post by mimixco »

DonHopkins wrote: post #20

Seymour Papert, introducing "The Turtle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs

Just that first video alone introduces and explains several key programming concepts: imperative programming with its hidden state and implicit instruction order, procedure calls with parameters, and operator-operand syntax -- all without ever having brought up any of that.

Re: History of Logo

#88

Post by kjs3 »

pvg wrote: post #43
kjs3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, bullshit. Preface: I go back to the 70s in programming. I've done 8-bit on 8080/Z80, 68xx/68hc11, 8051, SMT8, 6502 and 2650. I've taught programming. Let's ignore the challenge of finding an assembler running on a common 8-bit home computer and getting it running and how much the early ones sucked. Let's ignore how little doco there was for those early 8-bits (no internet, remember). Let's ignor…

I go back to the 70s in programming. Like the poster at the start of the subthread, I was a kid with an 8-bitter and my impression of Logo at the time was similar. It was neat, I read some Logo books but it was too slow. For a lot of things, BASIC was too slow as well and so like many self-respecting nerdkids, I learned assembly and used it a lot. This was typical and there were so many of us, we still regularly cros…

Heh. My deep pondering was honestly on the Z80 side. CP/M and such. But thinking about "what do I need to keep in the first 256 bytes to make this fly" and all the other interesting quirks of the 6502 are still fascinating.

Re: History of Logo

#89

Post by larsbrinkhoff »

klotz wrote: post #76
larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also running on the emulator: PDP-10 Logo, PDP-11 Logo, Applle II Logo. The emulator doesn't support the robot arm yet.

Thank you for doing this, Lars, and thank you for all the amazing historical research and preservation you are doing on the PDP-10 and the origins of operating systems, Lisp, Logo, symbolic math Macsyma, and all of the software and system zeitgeist that produced Logo. We always felt like we were packaging up what our AI lab hacker culture was like, in "mind-sized bites" as Seymour said.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm grateful for the quirky, fun, and interesting work and research that was done, and glad it much of it has been preserved. (Also sad some of it has been lost.)
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