[HN Gopher] History of Logo
___________________________________________________________________
History of Logo
Author : lelf
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-05-02 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (escholarship.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (escholarship.org)
| mimixco wrote:
| 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.
| lou1306 wrote:
| One of Logo's derivatives, NetLogo [1], seems to be pretty
| popular among academics as an agent-based modeling tool. It also
| has a neat browser interpreter. Worth a look, IMO.
|
| [1]: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from
| the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document,
| 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the
| rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots,
| plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP
| laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code
| and comments.
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp
|
| Lars Brinkhoff got some of this code to run in MacLisp on an
| emulator! (I don't know how much of the historical hardware the
| emulator supports yet, but he's probably worked on some of that
| too. ;) )
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620
|
| Thanks to Lars, here are two revisions of an AI Lab memo about
| LLOGO:
|
| http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf
|
| http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf
|
| And a Logo manual and glossary of PDP-11 Logo:
|
| http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf
|
| http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315.pdf
|
| http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315a.pdf
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Also running on the emulator: PDP-10 Logo, PDP-11 Logo, Applle
| II Logo.
|
| The emulator doesn't support the robot arm yet.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I have nightmares about that! ;)
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacin.
| ..
| nicetryguy wrote:
| Aaaand once again Gary Kildall gets left out of history. While
| CEO of Digital Research, the largest software company at the time
| (besides IBM), he did an entire implementation himself! DR Logo
| had some innovative graphical features.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4P6MDuk3Zk
| ken wrote:
| Logo was a hard pill to swallow in the 1980's. It had some neat
| features 'on paper' but it was hard to appreciate them because it
| was agonizingly slow on the computers of the day.
|
| It was the first programming experience I ever had where I'd type
| in my function, and then had to wait a while for the computer to
| do something to it (it never used the word "compiler"), and then
| it could run. I remember thinking: this makes programming not-
| fun. I could write it in assembler faster than I'm waiting for
| the "...." to dance across the screen.
| TheBlight wrote:
| I never really thought of LOGO as a programming language as a
| kid. It just seemed like a game to me. I also had no concept of
| anything with a computer being fast or slow so its speed seemed
| normal.
| ken wrote:
| That's an interesting connection. Logo claimed to be
| "interactive" but staring at a compilation log go by for 30
| or 60 (or more) seconds really pushed the limits of what one
| might consider "interactive".
|
| Whereas, "Robot Odyssey" was an actual game, and it was a
| terrific way to get me even more interested in programming.
| You never had to just sit and wait on it -- or maybe you did
| but they disguised it so well with animation or loading
| screens or whatever that I never noticed.
| TheBlight wrote:
| I don't remember the details but I remember some of the
| kids who were good at math would get to go to the computer
| room sometimes and instead of math class and we'd make LOGO
| programs or do other stuff on Commodore PETs. Just seemed
| like fun. We each had to bring our own disk with our name
| on it. This was like 2nd and 3rd grade.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Reminds me of a comic I saw in an old Apple ][ magazine:
|
| (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."
| pgtan wrote:
| Logo rules big times!
| crznthndr wrote:
| Even in 2020, I was pleasantly surprised that my kids school
| teaches Logo at the elementary school level! However, I had a
| hard time convincing parents who were suggesting it to be
| replaced with Python or a more modern programming language :(
| pgtan wrote:
| You lucky! My kid's school teaches Delphi/TurboPascal (8.
| grade, first programming language course), which they
| replaced with Lazarus unable to install Delphi on modern PCs.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| On one hand, Lazarus and Free Pascal are great so it is
| nice to see it being used as an introduction to
| programming.
|
| On the other hand... Lazarus is way too complicated for
| someone's first foray into programming, IMO. The IDE throws
| at you a barrage of windows, buttons, lists, etc that can
| be almost as overwhelming as an airplane's cockpit :-P.
|
| I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch
| the text mode IDE (outside of looking weird to anyone who
| didn't grew up with Turbo Pascal, almost no
| terminal/console works reliably enough for it and even in
| cases where it works, the IDE itself is very buggy -
| especially in the recent versions) and develop a simple
| GUI-based one akin to Turbo Pascal for Windows (ie.
| something that focuses only on small-sized programs) and
| have Lazarus as the "next step". Hell, it could even be
| based on Lazarus since most of its functionality is in the
| form of reusable components.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I always maintained that Free Pascal should either
| ditch the text mode IDE
|
| Why not fix the bugs instead? And it shouldn't look weird
| to anyone who has used TUI programs. In fact, we really
| should have support for these TUI features (stackable
| text windows, mouse-controlled menubar and widgets,
| context-sensitive status-bar) right inside emacs, or some
| other generic editor. They have stood the test of time
| wrt. intuitiveness and ergonomics, and it's weird that we
| still lack them in terminal-like environments.
| new2628 wrote:
| There's some merit to both sides. As a kid in the eighties, I
| remember being annoyed by Logo -- it seemed a toy, and even
| as I child I wanted to learn the tools with which "real
| programs" (mostly games) could be written.
| pgtan wrote:
| Berkeley Logo has higher order mapping functions like
| "cascade" and "crossmap" which I miss in modern Emacs Lisp
| with its countless packages for example.
|
| If you want something more fancier, NetLogo provides agent
| based parallelism which is more suitable for games.
|
| The only thing I miss in (Berkeley) Logo is a better fill
| function.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Snap! has the full power of Scheme (first class functions,
| user defined blocks, recursion, closures, continuations,
| JavaScript integration, etc), with a visual block syntax
| and playful graphical environment with turtle graphics like
| Scratch.
|
| 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 Monig, 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 Monig 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:User
| n...
|
| 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/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUj
| I...
|
| 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/
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| kilbuz wrote:
| When I was in elementary school in the 80s, someone in our
| district retrofit a school bus with two rows of computers running
| along the sides. The bus would travel to each school in the
| district once a month or so. We would all walk out to the parking
| lot, board the bus, and use Logo. It was probably the first
| exposure to a computer most of the kids in my class had, and I
| have never forgotten it.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Wow, that was cool. My first exposure to programing was also
| logo, back in the 80s, back in eastern europe. It was in the
| form of an afterschool program my father found out about. I
| loved it. Then when first dabbling in basic my first instinct
| was to try to draw with it. I think theres something inherently
| good about computer drawing that attracts kids to computers at
| early ages, before they are capable of developing interest for
| abstract ideas and problem solving.
|
| For older kids who want to learn programming I definitely
| recommend starting with Racket. It comes with cool libraries
| and small games can be built very creatively. Plus a lot more.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| A Logomobile!
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Bus-Window-Sticker-Decal/dp/B0...
|
| Could they program the computers inside the bus to drive it
| around, like Robot Odyssey? ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-harde...
|
| https://www.robotodyssey.online/
|
| I suppose there could be a downside to that:
|
| https://www.vaildaily.com/news/photos-turtle-bus-rescued-by-...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Lars Brinkhoff suggests that this thread comp.lang.logo with
| Brian Harvey and Leigh Klotz is required reading:
|
| 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).
| chrisdone wrote:
| There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne
| Hermans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ) that claims
| that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on
| how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent
| from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the
| "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and
| Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student]
| of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant
| unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a
| worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of
| programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most
| of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond
| nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne
| made me think about it more critically.
| rzzzt wrote:
| OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in
| Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw
| markdeloura wrote:
| Thanks for the link! It's a great discussion to have and should
| be a topic for all learning, not just CS Ed. If you look at the
| K-12 CS Ed standards defined at the state level, you'll find a
| generally coherent approach to staged learning of CS, both in
| terms of computational thinking structure (teach sequential
| behavior before conditional behavior) and language complexity
| (Scratch first, Java later). It's also worth considering
| playful or project-based approaches vs rigorous curricula-based
| learning... we're lucky to start with playfulness in CS because
| of the history of Logo. But what about for example,
| aeronautics? You might really enjoy learning to build and fly a
| rocket in Kerbal Space Program, but at some point you might
| yearn for more and benefit from a deep dive into some
| scaffolded traditional curricula. Then you can come back to
| Kerbal and apply what you learned, etc etc. Perhaps there's
| some sort of optimal cadence, different for each person and
| their interests. What's the analog for CS Ed?
| soperj wrote:
| Logo was definitely my introduction to programming. Never thought
| of it as programming. Lots of fun. We tried to make an animation
| with it as a kid.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| My first exposure to computers was through Logo in 1992!
|
| Thinking back, it was really effective in grabbing your attention
| and making you want to experiment with different commands!
|
| This is a good reminder that Logo is still a great teaching tool,
| especially for kids.
|
| I suppose python + turtle can replicate the effect to some degree
| as well.
|
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Also thanks to Lars Brinkhoff's research:
|
| Here's a video uploaded by Cynthia Solomon. Seems legit.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ
|
| Definitely check out the rest of Cynthia Solomon's youtube video
| treasure trove, with lots of great stuff by Marvin and Margaret
| Minsky, Seymour Papert, and others from MIT and Atari Cambridge
| Research:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos
|
| Seymour Papert on Logo, Turtles and Giraffes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM
|
| A gestural programming system developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny
| Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia
| Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M
|
| Marvin Minsky demonstrating a Logo Machine with an acoustic modem
| and cassette tape, talking about education theory, and showing a
| part of his first "thinking" machine: a simulated nerve synapse
| (1 of 40) with an adjustable knob that he built in 1951 out of
| WW-II surplus hardware, and discussing playing with Tinker Toys
| as a child:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64
|
| David Levitt demonstrating his musical improvisation software:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-05-02 23:00 UTC)