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Comment by kashishgrover | Hacker News Reader

Ah, this brings back memories from my childhood. The first programming language I ever used was Logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language). This was sometime back in 2002-2003 when I was 7 or 8 years old. We had very basic PCs in my school, many of which were purely DOS based.

This is a great tool to teach kids programming!

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I remember the turtle game, as well as lego logo. It must have been something like 1991.

The teachers at my school were just completely clueless at teaching programming or anything to do with computers. We would just run through work sheets that told you what to type. Hardly anyone got any real instruction. It wasn't until DOOM came out that I got motivated to self-teach.

I remember when teaching a subset of LOGO that we wanted a cool input program for students. So I built reverse logo [1] to turn an image (black-and-white, contiguous) into a logo program that draws it.

[1]: https://github.com/nitnelave/reverse-logo

It was my first programming language as well, here in India. Around 1996s had it in school.

Brings back memories of those huge monitors with the turtle on the screen ;)

They were magical back then.

Python has turtle graphics:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

> This is a great tool to teach kids programming!

One would think so! It was taught at our school (didn't take the course myself, about 15 years old at the time) and I only remember my classmates complaining, that it was boring. Some of them wanted to learn "real programming" instead. Drawing shapes with a turtle felt overly childish and pedagogic even then.

I think it's a good introduction but would be very boring to stay focused on for any length of time. But my first thought upon seeing this was if someone, especially a younger person wanted to go from 0 knowledge of programming to a little bit, just get the idea of what it's like so they can see it's not magic, this would be a great start.

I think 15 is too old to teach Logo. It works better when the kids are ten years old or so.

Logo was I think the second language I learned after Commodore Basic but the on the C64. The third was probably Gary Kitchen's Game Maker scripting. This was all mid 80s. Logo though did feel transformative to me.

Not only does "Shelly" reference the LOGO turtle, but LOGO itself was probably referencing Grey Walter's tortoise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQE82derooc

Same here. Logo was my first programming language at 9 or 10 back in 1989 in eastern Europe. Long live Logo. Kids nowadays ought to have a similar intro

Logo was such a common denominator when I was in primary. Two decades later I was sent a resume with Logo skills listed, it was an obvious inside joke, but picking up on it ensured we started off on the very right foot.

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