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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

LOGO lives!

LOGO was my first interaction with a computer back in 1996. We had to write one program in LOGO in our computer class and we were allowed to play one of the following three games for rest of the period: Dangerous Dave, Paratrooper, or Prince of Persia.

LOGO and Dangerous Dave were my childhood. I never was able to complete DAVE :(

(This was around 2005 for me!)

Did we both study in Greets, Kochi?

We learned the same lessons for the parts of CPU, computer generations, Babbage and co for 5 years. Our lab exams was more means than ends, so `pir*2` will carry more marks than `3.14r*r`.

I got an Amstrad PCW handed down to me from my dad as my first PC around the same time.

Booted always with disk 1 and that was Locoscript and learned typing on that thing.

When I discovered there is a second disk that boots you in some dark and hidden alternative mode (read: CP/M) I felt like a hacker.

Hidden inside this cave was the only program the manual mentioned in this section: Logo! I did not know that my PC could display anything except characters and it was. so. amazing. to see self-drawn lines on that thing.

To be fair, turtle graphics is not itself Logo, Logo was originally designed for text manipulation (because all schools had at that time were teletype terminals). Then came the idea of a physical turtle robot, then the graphical turtle when schools got computers with CRT displays.

My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)

The LOGO I got to use when I was 12 was practically a micro-Lisp with turtle graphics. JavaScript is a sort of a Lisp. Thus "LOGO lives" seems appropriate to me :)

> My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)

That's very cool!

I want to preface this by noting that as an adult, I totally understand the intent behind LOGO, its use as an educational tool, and understand its historic place in computer history.

But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?

It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.

We did LOGO then some sort of watered down BASIC. Both were incredibly useless to my education because at no point was any serious attempt ever made to teach that these were the tip of any sort of computer programming iceberg. We were simply given lessons and assignments and told to things and we just did them without understanding what we were doing. At least with math they had some example applications for everything they taught us.

I have less than zero nostalgia for either.

You could peek and poke with LOGO... At least the one I used.

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