Forward 40: Where is LOGO?

Oh man! All through elementary school in India, we were taught in every single class that "LOGO is the language of the computer". This was about 12 years ago.

I didn't really like the computer or programming much back then and almost flunked the LOGO exam. That just goes to say how cool the language is--I went into the exam clueless but after typing a few "LEFT" and "RIGHT" I was amazed it did exactly what you ask it to.

I never liked LOGO. It was just one of the programs available for us to play with during 'computer lab time', and as far as I can remember we were never taught how to use it; commands were passed on in a sort of oral tradition from older schoolmates to younger. Since then, I've learned how cool it can really be and wondered about it often, though. Anybody know of a good, true-to-the-old-school-basic-program that's freeware for Win32?

*Edit: And while I'm at it with old games and such that I miss...anybody know where I can get ahold of a BASIC with the old nibbles.bas and gorilla.bas that came with QBASIC?

Logo hasn't disappeared, though it's evolved a bit. Northwestern University has a version of Logo called NetLogo.

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

It's a decentralized version of logo, where you can control multiple turtles at once. It's useful in simulating distributed systems, such as "turtles, termites, and traffic jams."

There's a book by Mitchel Resnick by the same name. http://books.google.com/books?id=K8P1rX8T4kYC&dq=turtles...

If you get a chance, run some of the simulations on their demo page. They're available as java applets. It's pretty amazing to see complex patterns stem from simple interactions, also a theme of Wolfram.

The article mentions Oregon Trail as another classic app that changed lives at a young age -- this is dead on. I remember playing Oregon Trail during "computer time" as young as 2nd grade (about 8 years old) and wondering how the computer translated my keyboard input into what to display on the screen. And thus, a future hacker's curiosity is piqued.

If only my family didn't die of dysentery so often...

I'm not a big fan of LOGO either. Drawing lines gets boring quickly.

I'm reminded of picking a university. I went to two introductory CS courses.

One had us drawing Mickey Mouse in Pascal on a old Mac, which gave me a deep hatred of Apple that lasted until I discovered OSX.

The other was an introduction to MINIX. And the end, we all received a disk with MINIX on it. I didn't even know at the time that there were alternatives to MS-DOS, and was deeply impressed.

Moral: Don't be condescending to kids - it's better to overestimate them. And LOGO is a condescending language.

In my school we had a mechanical turtle that drew lines on a big piece of paper on the floor. If you were really good and didn't mess around with your screen turtle you got to have a go at using it. We had to stop using it when someone gave it the command FORWARD 500 and it pulled its own cable out of the computer. Good times.

I will never forget programming an animated rocket that blasts off in my 3rd grade glass... Logo is great.