[HN Gopher] FD 100
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FD 100
Author : AlexeyBrin
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-01-09 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (susam.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (susam.net)
| pjscott wrote:
| I had the strangest experience with Logo in junior high. The
| computer class taught people some basic drawing commands -- going
| forward, turning left and right, moving the virtual pen up and
| down, etc. -- but for some reason banned us from using any
| commands that were "too advanced", by which they meant anything
| beyond the basic drawing primitives. The thing is, the whole
| _point_ of Logo is to make thing like looping and conditionals
| visually intuitive and fun. A the time it was frustrating; in
| retrospect it 's also farcical. Such a waste!
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| It's possible that they didn't have anyone who knew the
| "advanced" commands, and didn't want precocious kids asking
| questions they couldn't answer.
| macintux wrote:
| I ran into that problem taking a Basic class in high school. I
| think it boiled down to the teacher didn't know much more than
| what he was presenting, so he didn't want us to jump ahead.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Fortunately we had the opposite. We had pascal and C classes
| until my senior year, when she started offering Visual Basic
| (which she was learning as she went). At the time QB then VB
| was my thing (I was working on multiplayer games using
| winsock controls), so she would ask me questions if someone
| went beyond her knowledge.
| lambdaba wrote:
| > Logo gave me a brief taste of functional programming even
| though back then I did not know the term "functional
| programming".
|
| This is what Unix pipes did for me. By the time I started
| programming constructing programs as series of side effect-free
| transformations felt perfectly natural (to be precise I did have
| some previous imperative programming experience and I didn't like
| it / grok it)
| Rygian wrote:
| I was surprised by this statement, as logo commands form very
| much an imperative language.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Superficially it looked like that... but I know very little
| about Logo, although Wikipedia puts it in the "Lisp" family
| so?
| macintux wrote:
| Imperative and FP aren't really in opposition; Erlang, e.g.,
| has been described as a functional language with an
| imperative core.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I agree 100% with the author -- logo as a child is what started
| me on programming. My first programming experience was in ~1981
| or so when my elementary school teacher brought an Apple II into
| our classroom. She was getting her MS in education, and it was
| on-loan from her college. It was loaded with Apple Logo, and you
| had to pry me away from it with a crowbar. That was one of the
| first times I stayed after school willingly. I hounded my parents
| mercilessly until they finally bought an Apple II clone.
|
| I eventually learned BASIC, and learned debugging and "hacking"
| by fixing the games that I typed in (incorrectly) from magazines
| and modifying them to do different things.
| llimos wrote:
| Such great memories...
|
| Logo, then moving on to Basic on the VTech Pre-Computer 1000,
| then GW-BASIC on PC (which to this day I never figured out how to
| exit! I used to turn the computer off and on again)
| krallja wrote:
| SYSTEM
| onetom wrote:
| I also struggled with this for awhile... Can't remember how
| have I figured it out at the end. I was programming in Forth
| before, so I even tried BYE :)
| llimos wrote:
| Where were you when I needed you 30 years ago??
| shimonabi wrote:
| In those days we had no internet. There were no books about LOGO
| programming in the library.
|
| The math teacher taught us the basic commands, but didn't explain
| the REPEAT command so we could understand and the importance of
| it. So I had no examples to follow or a real mentor to suggest a
| book. Later I learned some basic Pascal, but it was only in high
| school when I taught myself programming in C++.
| loeg wrote:
| Discussed recently:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604197
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28461915
| empressplay wrote:
| If you'd like to play around with a 3D implementation of Logo,
| check out https://turtlespaces.org -- there's a webassembly build
| that runs in the browser with a Javascript IDE, and compiled
| application versions for Windows, macOS and Linux
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| This is so amazing, using absolute minimal primitives to achieve
| interesting results. Would love to see more FD100 works.
| AlexeyBrin wrote:
| There is an entire book dedicated to Turtle geometry:
| https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4663/Turtle-GeometryThe-Co...
| gagzilla wrote:
| There are also web implementations like
| https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ or https://turtleacademy.com/
| which kids love to play with (and I'll admit is fun for us
| adults too!) The fern example in particular is surprisingly
| beautiful.
| robin_reala wrote:
| We had a LOGO turtle at school in the late 80s I guess? I can't
| remember if it was hooked up to the BBC Micros or the RM Nimbus
| pseudo-PC that were popular in UK schools at the time. But either
| way, it seemed amazingly cool.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| This seems a pretty common thing, to have a pleasant nostalgic
| memory of Logo as a fun introduction to programming. My
| experience with it was pretty different - I found it pretty
| pointless and boring at the time, and it didn't have any pull on
| me the way C later did.
|
| Ironically, a big part of what made C fun for me were the Borland
| conio (console I/O) and graphics libraries. But those were fun
| only because I could respond to user interactions, and make
| simple games and other playful things. Looking back on it, that
| was probably the missing ingredient with Logo for me - we were
| never taught any ways of user input, they were just static
| programs that did one thing, and that feels fundamentally
| different.
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(page generated 2022-01-09 23:01 UTC)