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People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education in the 8-bit age, they were hoping they could push out LOGO as a new standard but it did not get a lot of traction.

Three years later Byte ran a special issue on LOGO which I thought was one of the best issues of Byte ever

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08

in particular it had some great reviews of LOGO implementations for different home computers some of which were pretty strange like the TRS-80 Coco and the TI-99/4A. It was very close to the cultural peak of the 1980s before Michael Jackson dropped off the charts, the Atari 2600 went down without being immediately replaced (unless you count the C-64), etc. Byte was a lively magazine so long as the market was split up between a wide range of computers but it never really found it's niche in a world dominated by the IBM PC at the high end and the C-64 at the low end.

Speaking of which, LISP never really caught on in the 8-bit era. This issue has some articles about how you would do so but it didn't seem to shoehorn so well into a tiny machine (like the 1k of RAM on the Sinclair ZX80) as BASIC did. From the viewpoint of a kid who just learned BASIC, FORTH seemed to offer a lot of what LISP did and it was very available, even if it was a few weeks of assembly coding to write a FORTH.

Pegasus Lisp for the 6502 Apple II was pretty god - I really enjoyed it.

> People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education

Like how we are all aghast at Python now. (All us Lispers, anyhow :-)

>The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language).

Hacker News discussion of BYTE's special Logo issue: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556>

>In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life!

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.

> I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.

Yep, this was 100% me too.

I "got" recursion through math and induction and a bit of graph paper, and the way it made my mind recurse to infinity made me feel ... funny ... in that age.

But it wasn't until I used Logo on the school's only Macintosh LC475 that I got the full psychedelic effects.

Nothing as intricate as NetLogo (e.g. see its Koch curve here: http://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#http://ccl.northwestern.edu...), but still a strong impression.

Funnily, that had as a consequence to fall in love with iterative function systems and pizzabox-form desktops, leading to me being introduced to Matila Ghyka's book, and Sun's Sparcstation 5.

> "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world."

Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway...

> "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages."

If anyone is interested in this, there are the following books:

* Exploring Language with Logo: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262570653

* Visual Modeling with Logo: A Structured Approach to Seeing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262530694

* Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics: https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificia...

* Computer Science Logo Style: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html

It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve, and I find it a bit sad that many kids are getting introduced to programming via something like Python or Scratch. I feel there's still space for Logo, and it would be cool to see an easily downloadable and installable version of it.

Turtle Geometry is still worth checking out. The value is in working through the ideas, and details of Logo take up very little of the book.

(I've only glanced through CS Logo Style and haven't seen the other two.)

I think the same basically goes for any of those books. One could easily port the code to Racket, for example.

Yeah. I recommend it because it goes way beyond the stuff another commenter complained about in this thread:

> A dozen articles about the language, with listings. The screenshots? All the same, showing recursive pictures of rectangles and circles. Great. LOGO can do that. But what else? Big empty void there.

E.g. the last chapter is an intro to general relativity, with a simulator for motion in curved spacetime.

(CS Logo Style also covers many topics, but it looked like they were all familiar to me as an experienced programmer. I haven't seen another book for programmers about most of the math in Turtle Geometry.)

Wasn't it predictable, though?

Take a look at that issue of BYTE entirely dedicated to LOGO that was referenced multiple times in this discussion.

A dozen articles about the language, with listings. The screenshots? All the same, showing recursive pictures of rectangles and circles. Great. LOGO can do that. But what else? Big empty void there.

Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOGO died out and BASIC thrived?

> Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOGO died out and BASIC thrived?

AIUI, implementations of BASIC on home computers were a lot simpler and more straightforward than LOGO or LISP - for instance, GC in BASIC was an afterthought and only applied to strings. The real competitor to BASIC back then was FORTH.

Mmmh... no.

I grew up and learned programming in that era, bought magazines, typed pages and pages of listings.

98% of the listings in these magazines were BASIC, 1% were assembly, and the rest was... well, others.

LOGO was a niche language then, and Forth even more so.

What could Basic do over Logo? As a few of the books I posted show, Logo is a very capable language, ignoring turtles. Was Logo in the 80s somehow less capable?

> Big empty void

See my comment upthread about Turtle Geometry.

> It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve

But it did remain around and evolve.

See, e. g.:

StarLogo Nova: https://www.slnova.org/

NetLogo: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Scratch was produced at MIT just like Logo and I think it is an evolution of what they were trying to do with Logo.

Despite the heritage of the creators, I personally view Scratch as a misstep. I am a big fan of visual programming, but Scratch is essentially an everyday imperative language with a structured editor and sprites. It doesn't maintain any of the simplicity or elegance of Logo or Lisp, and I'm honestly a bit surprised that the MIT Media Lab invests so much in it.

My first experience programming was with a LOGO turtle in third grade. I remember the lab full of Apple IIs, and the joy of PEN DOWN, UP 10, PEN UP style commands.