Logo (programming language)

Logo is an educational programming language created in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. Its name comes from the Greek word logos, meaning 'word' or 'thought'. This language was made to help students learn about programming in a fun way.

One special feature of Logo is turtle graphics. With turtle graphics, special commands tell a small robot, called a turtle, how to move and draw. This helps students understand how computers work by seeing the results of their commands as lines and shapes on a screen.

Logo is also a multi-paradigm language, meaning it can be used in many different ways. It is based on another language called Lisp and can be used to teach many computer science ideas. One popular version of Logo is UCBLogo, which helps students learn about lists, files, and more.

Usually, Logo programs are run directly by a computer without being turned into a special set of instructions first. This makes it easy to test and change programs. Even though there are many versions of Logo, they all share the same basic ideas, making it a great tool for learning programming.

History

Logo was created in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Wally Feurzeig, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert. It was designed to help children learn by playing with words and ideas in a special kind of world. The first version of Logo could show pictures right away, helping kids see what their commands did.

In 1969, the first real Logo turtle robot was made. Before that, there was a picture of a turtle on the screen. These turtles helped kids learn programming by moving and drawing, making learning fun and easy to understand.

Turtle and graphics

See also: Turtle graphics

Logo is famous for its turtle feature, which comes from a small robot of the same name. The turtle is a cursor on the screen that follows commands to move and draw lines. It can look like a triangle or a turtle, and some versions let you change its shape.

The turtle moves based on its own position. For example, the command LEFT 90 makes it turn left by 90 degrees. Some Logo programs let you have many turtles at once and even change how they look. Turtle graphics are also used in other places, like for creating special patterns called fractals.

Implementations

Some modern versions of Logo allow thousands of turtles to move independently. Two popular versions are Massachusetts Institute of Technology's StarLogo and Northwestern University Center for Connected Learning's (CCL) NetLogo. They help explore how things happen naturally and come with many experiments in areas like social studies, biology, and physics.

There are many different versions of Logo, with 308 known types. Some are still used in schools, like MicroWorlds Logo and Imagine Logo. Others were made for old computers, like Apple Logo for the Apple II Plus and Atari Logo for the Atari 8-bit computers. Some newer versions include LibreLogo, which works with LibreOffice, and online versions like Lynx and LogoMor.

Influence

Logo had a big effect on other programming languages and tools. It helped shape Smalltalk and inspired Etoys, an educational tool built using Squeak, which is related to Smalltalk. Logo also influenced how agents, or moving objects, are programmed in AgentSheets and AgentCubes, similar to Logo’s turtle.

Logo was the base for Boxer, a language made to be easy for everyone to use, created at the University of California, Berkeley and MIT. There are also tools like KTurtle, a version of Logo for the KDE desktop, and newer ones like Kojo, a version of Scala, and Scratch, a fun, visual language you can use in a web browser.