LOGO

A powerful programming language built to be easy for children to use. LOGO is essentially a dialect of LISP without the parentheses that traditional LISP requires. It has been implemented in many versions including Brian Harvey's UCBLogo and the multimedia authoring toolkit called Hyperstudio.

Sometimes there is confusion between the fully fledge programming language and the graphics module that implements turtle graphics.

There are lessons to be learned in all of these systems if OLPC application developers wish to stand on the shoulders of giants rather than reinvent the wheel over and over again.

Variations

LogoWiki

http://www.logowiki.net

Recently developed by Alan Kay and friends. Built on top of JavaScript. Is this enough Logo?

PyLogo

http://pylogo.org/PyLogo.html

Works under Python (which, it seems, will be a given in the laptop). Is this enough Logo?

Scratch

http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/summaries/scratch.shtml

Runs under Squeak (which is bulky?). Is this enough Logo?

UCBLogo

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

Needs a better GUI (Brian Harvey is working on one, but he is working on it alone and as a hobby). It can be translated (without recompilation) to languages that have their character sets in 1 byte encodings. It was been translated to Spanish (LogoES)

aUCBLogo

http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/~micheler/

Needs testing, packaging and materials (maybe it's still too beta)

MSWLogo

http://www.softronix.com/logo.html

Needs a migration to Linux. Has lots of learning material on the Internet

FMSLogo

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fmslogo

Needs a migration to Linux

NetLogo

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

Freeware, but not open source. Requires Java. Actively developed; high quality.

Necessary features

• Standard Language syntax (as close as in Brian Harveys' UCBLogo)
• Multilingual support
• Trigonometric functions, sqrt, exp, power, log, ln (to be able to draw at least figure 24 accurately)

Requested Features

• Optional inputs, like UCBLogo
• ColorUnder (or "Pixel")
• SetPenColor
• Extensions to exploit Hardware features
• Extensions to interact with OS to allow scripting

Opinions

• LOGO could be an excellent way to introduce programming and logic. I started with it!! I think this should be an starter way, but definitely and impreved new version (with more than one "turtle" at least). Today's children can understand easily and faster everything related to computers. And could be some kind of art too if are given the propers tools. (filling closed shapes, or maybe object oriented). Could be a very nice piece of soft!! --Gandolfi

• LOGO is certainly a fun way to learn programming and/or to just play with a computer. Many modern implementations have multiple screen turtles. Perghaps at its simplest this can be found in MSWLogo (for Windows). - FREE. Newer flavors of LOGO are StarLogo and NetLogo. They offer powerful ways of controlling large swarms of turtles and their environment - the great benefit being to encourage truly distributed ways of thinking and programming. --L Pfeffer

Problems

Vaporware?

There are more than 150 different versions of LOGO. Few of them are free, fewer are multi-lenguage, fewer have a nice GUI, none? On top of that Turtle Graphics is not really LOGO. Kturtle is just Turtle Graphics and with the current version of KTurtle not even construct 24 can be drawn accurately. Basic information on the 161 known Logos can be found Logo Atlas including their manuals. Interesting work has been done in French, Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries that are more language independant.

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Both NetLogo and StarLogo need Java, no? So Logo is still vaporware for our practical purposes.

NOTE that any and all software is grist for the mill. If NetLogo would be an asset to the OLPC, then we should try to set up a project to write a subset of NetLogo in Python which is supported by OLPC.