[HN Gopher] Logo: Programming with Turtle Graphics (IBM PC) (1983)
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       Logo: Programming with Turtle Graphics (IBM PC) (1983)
        
       Author : susam
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2024-06-16 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (archive.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
        
       | susam wrote:
       | This HN submission is incredibly special to me! I had been
       | searching for this manual for a very long time, finding several
       | closely related documents but never this particular one. When I
       | couldn't locate the manual anywhere, I turned to the HN community
       | with an "Ask HN" post [1].
       | 
       | Remarkably, within just 23 hours, a generous HN user, rmini,
       | scanned all 240 pages of the manual and shared it with us [2].
       | 
       | See the links below for the discussion on the aforementioned "Ask
       | HN" post that resulted in this document becoming available on
       | archive.org! Thank you, @rmini, for your generosity and help!
       | 
       | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40691792
       | 
       | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40694386
        
       | mmastrac wrote:
       | I'm a little biased because I grew up with it, but I think the
       | best LOGO implementation was for the COLECO ADAM, with its
       | amazing manual:
       | 
       | https://archive.org/details/coleco-adam-smart-logo-manual
        
       | dvirsky wrote:
       | That is the first programming environment I ever used. It was an
       | amazing starting point.
        
         | yonder wrote:
         | For me as well. I've been a CTO of a software company since
         | 2011, but this is how I got started.
        
       | delduca wrote:
       | I learned how to program in Logo at the age of 8, using the
       | turtle.
        
         | ylee wrote:
         | I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in
         | elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion
         | is.
         | 
         | While I have never worked as a professional software developer,
         | computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact
         | that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years
         | is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
        
       | GZGavinZhao wrote:
       | At least until around 2015 my elementary school was still using
       | Logo as a introduction to programming using a Logo implementation
       | on Windows 7. We had no idea that what we were doing was
       | programming; it was just fun to see what sort of weird/crazy
       | shapes we could come up with and share with other students.
       | 
       | I think its purpose has now been replaced by Scratch, but still,
       | good times and I will always remember that little turtle that
       | brought us tons of fun.
        
       | sleepybrett wrote:
       | I did a summer school/camp program at my local HS when i was
       | about maybe 10 or 11 where we learned logo on apple //s, they
       | even had a could of turtle robots that were controlled via, i
       | assume, the serial port. So by the end we all got to send one of
       | our programs to the bot to draw out in sharpie on a big roll of
       | craft paper. I'm sure in my parents attic somewhere there it's
       | probably still rolled up in a box.
       | 
       | Love the immediacy and physicality of that to this day, which is
       | why i still love processing as a learning language for kids.
       | 
       | Oh nice, someone has done some work restoring on of those little
       | robots: https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=70
        
         | 082349872349872 wrote:
         | For their ancestors, see:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots
        
       | ayhanfuat wrote:
       | "How do I move the turtle in Logo" was one of the controversial
       | questions in Stack Overflow back in the date. It was posted by
       | Joel Spolsky, one of the co-creators and then deleted by Jeff
       | Atwood, the other co-creator. I like it because it illustrates
       | the two cultures so well. Joel thought it was a reasonable and
       | answerable question and Jeff thought it wasn't specific enough to
       | be a real question. In the end Stack Overflow went Jeff's way
       | which I think is a pity. The question was undeleted later for its
       | "historical significance":
       | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
        
       | cies wrote:
       | My first proglang, at age 7, was MSX-LOGO. English is not my
       | first language, but this language was translated to my mother
       | tongue, and came with an instruction book in my mother tongue. So
       | I could get started, all by myself, at a rather young age.
       | 
       | After getting the fundamentals down in MSX-LOGO, I learned BASIC
       | and some part of English at the same time: learning BASIC made
       | learning English fun. This was before I had any classes in
       | English.
       | 
       | I hoped MSX-BASIC allowed me to make fast running programs, but
       | it did not. It was not until many years later that I got
       | introduced to open source. Now I has access to compilers,
       | libraries, languages: everything I needed to make fast programs.
       | 
       | Aware of my new found powers I decided to build a modern version
       | of MSX-LOGO: an integrated programming environment for learning
       | purpose in which the syntax is translated to the mother tongue of
       | the programmer. I got it into the KDE project so it would be
       | translated.
       | 
       | Tada:
       | 
       | https://apps.kde.org/kturtle/
       | 
       | I've met several people who's first experience with programming
       | was with KTurtle in a language other than English (it's currently
       | translated in 25+ languages)
       | 
       | https://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kf6/package/kturtle/
       | 
       | If we want to have a rich open source ecosystem we better make
       | the on-ramp for new contributors are easy as can be. In this way
       | I wanted to give back (help strengthen) the open source commons.
        
       | twothamendment wrote:
       | I used turtle in middle school. I think that was my first
       | experience where I got to tell a computer what to do and make
       | something. We had a very limited amount of time in the lab, but I
       | loved every bit if it!
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-16 23:01 UTC)