What computer did you learn to program LOGO language on?

[Bill Brasky]

Coleco ADAM here. Man, those were some sweet geometric patterns I drew. I could draw boxes, circles, triangles etc. AND fill them in with color!

[Osbo]

XT 8088... with 512K and hercules display... man was that thing HUGE...

[MacbthPSW]

I can't tell if you're joking or not, but my answer is entirely serious: C-64!

[liveinabin]

BBC Micro at school.

[Atari-Jess]

My math text books had LOGO all the way up to grade 8.

 

I learned by reading those. (but never bothered use those old Unisys ICON machines to test the code)

 

...I miss the Unisys ICON

Edited February 3, 2007 by Atari-Jess

[Vic George 2K3]

Briefly toyed with it using the Apple IIe. Never fully got into it.

[Inky]

Coleco ADAM here. Man, those were some sweet geometric patterns I drew. I could draw boxes, circles, triangles etc. AND fill them in with color!

 

ADAM also!

 

SmartLOGO is one of the better releases from Back In The Day

 

I still putz around with it a bit. Too bad its interpreted, as its a powerful little language

Edited February 3, 2007 by Inky

[Murph74]

Chalk up another SmartLOGO user.

[+kisrael]

Atari Logo!

 

4 Turtles! That looked liked turtles!

 

Plus you could set up daemons to respond to events, like joystick and button presses.

 

Brilliant!

[JamesD]

But did you do anything useful with it?

[zeropolis79]

I learnt LOGO using DRLogo on my amstrad cpc6128.. I did some very fancy stuff with it. I've still got some listings in one of my notebooks - will have to warm it up on the emulator and make them again and show some grabs

[bcprs1]

Apple IIe baby in the 4th grade. I can remember drawing the solar system for a class project. Anyone also remember a program called Delta Drawing? We used to spend hours with that one.

[+kisrael]

But did you do anything useful with it?

Uhh, useful?

 

I made a play Terrarium, which later got me interested in A-Life...

 

And it taught me about event handlers...

[Shannon]

Atari logo here...

 

Logo has nice word parsing features.

[jaybird3rd]

I don't remember if I used TI Logo II or Atari Logo for the 400/800 first, but it was one of those two. I liked Atari PILOT also.

 

I wonder why Logo seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years; when I was a kid, just about every elementary school seemed to be using Logo (usually Terrapin Logo on the Apple ][) in the classroom as an educational tool. I still think it's a VERY nice language, and being a dialect of LISP, it's a powerful and versatile one as well.

[MacbthPSW]

I wonder why Logo seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years;

Do you think it's Logo that has fallen out of favour, or just programming for kids in general? From the little I've observed, programming doesn't appear to be taught until at least high school nowadays.

[jaybird3rd]

I wonder why Logo seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years;

Do you think it's Logo that has fallen out of favour, or just programming for kids in general? From the little I've observed, programming doesn't appear to be taught until at least high school nowadays.

Probably programming in general, I'm afraid. It's amazing that there seems to be less programming taking place in elementary schools today than in the 1980s, even though the machines and tools are more powerful and affordable. The few times I've seen young kids taught any kind of programming, they're either using Java (ugh!) or simplified "languages" like the graphical design tools in those Lego Mindstorms robot kits. Most freshmen that I've talked to at my university don't even have any idea what Logo is.

[+kisrael]

Computers that no longer boot into BASIC, and don't have any non-scripting language preinstalled and a bit "in your face" is part of the problem.

 

Why ugh for Java?

[jaybird3rd]

Why ugh for Java?

That was a reaction to the idea of using a heavily object-oriented language like Java as an introductory programming language, which IMHO is not the right way to get somebody started, especially not a young kid. A person who is new to programming needs an understanding of certain fundamental concepts (simple sequential programming, subroutines, functions, etc) before they can hope to grasp abstract data types, encapsulation, and other higher-level concepts of object-orientedness that depend on the fundamental ones. I suppose you could teach all of those things with Java if you really wanted to, but Java has a very strict syntax and some very annoying inconsistencies and quirks, both of which can be an added source of frustration to new programmers. In contrast, it's easy for even a non-programmer to understand simple Logo code, and BASIC isn't too much of a leap beyond that. Edited February 9, 2007 by jaybird3rd

[+madman]

I can't remember what came first, either on my C-64 at home or the Apple IIes in my elementary school. I used to stay up late (well, what was considered late for that age range) playing around with LOGO. Fun times.

[+kisrael]

Why ugh for Java?

That was a reaction to the idea of using a heavily object-oriented language like Java as an introductory programming language, which IMHO is not the right way to get somebody started, especially not a young kid. A person who is new to programming needs an understanding of certain fundamental concepts (simple sequential programming, subroutines, functions, etc) before they can hope to grasp abstract data types, encapsulation, and other higher-level concepts of object-orientedness that depend on the fundamental ones. I suppose you could teach all of those things with Java if you really wanted to, but Java has a very strict syntax and some very annoying inconsistencies and quirks, both of which can be an added source of frustration to new programmers. In contrast, it's easy for even a non-programmer to understand simple Logo code, and BASIC isn't too much of a leap beyond that.

Figured it was something like that.

 

I've recommended DarkBasic and that other, similar one.

 

I think VB3/VB4 wouldn't be awful either (picked it up myself in college, and actually taught a class in it at my University); kind of fun event-driven model there.

 

There's processing.org, that's trying to be easy, though I think later revisions have made it less n00b friendly. Still fun for throwing together random stuff for the web.

[jaybird3rd]

I've recommended DarkBasic and that other, similar one.

You mean Blitz BASIC? I've heard good things about both of them, although I've never had occasion to use them. I do agree that they (or VB3/VB4) would indeed be a much better starting place than the C/C++/Java family.