>Does this mean that the use of the language is more important than the language itself?

The answer is a resounding yes. C became popular because it is the native language of Unix. It was Rails that made Ruby popular. JavaScript is popular because it is implemented by all the browsers. Objective-C became popular because of iOS, and similarly with Swift. Visual Basic was one of the most popular languages for a time because it made Windows GUI programming easier. The ecosystem and use of a language is far more important than the language itself.

Does anybody still have a copy of the file from the MIT-AI Lab PDP-10 called "AI: HUMOR; LOGO TURTLE" or something like that? I haven't been able to find a copy myself, but I remember reading it and have confirmed that it existed, and that it was published in SIGART around 1982.

It was Leigh Klotz's sarcastic response to a Defense Department questionnaire to Terrapin about how their technology could be used to kill people.

He proposed deploying a swarm of thousands of LOGO turtles to crawl around the battlefield in mesmerizing geometric patterns, and stab the enemy with a quick succession of PENUP and PENDOWN commands (proving once again that the pen is mightier than the sword).

Cybernetic Zoo: A history of cybernetic animals and early robots: 1969 – The Logo Turtle – Seymour Papert et al (Sth African/American):

http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-tur...

Logo's Yellow Turtle: First programmed in 1970. Built at MIT AI Lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFhFPNO8hc

Logo Update, Volume 4, Number 3 - Spring 1996:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120904211432/http://el.media.mi...

Python offers a nice Logo-like environment using "import turtle".

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

Logo is actually more than just a toy language for turtle graphics. It's a serious language with a lot of inspiration from Lisp (although not using sexps).

The book Turtle Geometry [1] by Harold Abelson of SICP fame is a pretty cool exploration of mathematics all the way up to non-euclidean geometry using turtle graphics.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificia...

I rewrote a Logo implementation in JavaScript in order to make a map of the train network in Taiwan.

http://peterburk.github.io/tra/

Existing maps were not bilingual, which caused me to take the wrong train and miss a concert. When I decided to redraw it, I wanted the map to not only have subway-style graphics, but also make the distance between the points be proportional to the time it takes a local train to travel between those stations.

If anyone else would like to use Logo to teach kids programming, and make time-proportional subway maps for other cities, please get in touch! I think it'd be a fun learning exercise.

Rebol and Red [1] are the only languages that I know which acknowledge having Logo heritage in their design and philosophy. Speaking from my experience, I can tell that working in them is indeed a deeply embodied microworld-like experience, they way author describes.

Manipulating homoiconic structures feels highly spatial, as if you're molding a clay with your own hands, or rather palpating the Urschleim. High polymorphism and rich standard library remove the mental burden and quite literally let you think in the language (hi mr. Iversion! [2]) and feel embodied in its runtime. Symbolic programming directly parallels the magic of natural language, its eerie occult power of controlling the world by non-physical means - remember how Sussman spoke about linguistic abstraction and magic incantations in SICP introduction?

In fact, in Red and Rebol everything is a little language (an embedded DSL), from metal to meta, and programs in them are this beautiful symbiogenetic ooze of micro-formats, slangs and linguistic DNA strands, from which your program slowly emerges [3]. Ultimately, you and your code become of one mind and body, stitched together by problem-solving intent. "I'm not moving the turtle, I am the turtle that moves!".

Even thinking about it gives me heebie-jeebies and brings to mind Tsutomu Nihei's Blame! [4] ever-growing City structure and Frictional Games' SOMA craziness [5]. Never experienced anything like that with any other programming language (except maybe for Forth and Lisp, but they are Red and Rebol ancestors too!).

--

On a slightly different note: there's a "Computer science Logo style" book series [6].

[1]: https://www.red-lang.org/

[2]: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

[3]: https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an-organism/

[4]: https://myanimelist.net/manga/149/Blame

[5]: https://somagame.com/

[6]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/exploring-logo

While Processing isn't logo-like in syntax it is logo-like in intention as in it tries to make it very easy for users to get graphics on to screen.

Processing is java-based, but it has spawned both a js verison 'p5.js' and a python version 'processing.py'.

https://processing.org/ https://p5js.org/ https://py.processing.org/

Regarding

...the elements of a language are features of a world I inhabit:

Environments are values floating above my head. I have an urge to glance up when I’m thinking about what’s in scope. A closure is a one-way tunnel or pipe or wormhole back into the function environment. But the program itself can’t flow through the pipe. Asynchronous control flow is a stream that I imagine myself floating down. I think about where the stream will take me. Functors are giant structures, like a sculpture by Richard Serra. Functor operations act like cranes, helping me to move around those structures.

27 years ago I began working on a programming language in which computational abstractions had concrete animated analogs [1]. ToonTalk was my attempt to make a Logo for the 90s. You programmed in a virtual world where you trained robots to put things in boxes, give birds messages to deliver, etc. The mappings are: computation: city, actor or process or object: house, methods: robots, method preconditions: contents of thought bubble, method actions: actions taught to robot, tuples or messages or vectors: boxes, comparison tests: scales, actor spawning: loaded trucks, actor termination: bombs, constants: numbers, text, and pictures, channel transmit capabilities: birds, channel receive capabilities: nests, program storage: notebooks.

ToonTalk became free and open source 12 years ago. 5 years ago I had time to re-implement much of it as a web app [2]. But as Don Hopkins wrote - I'm focussed now on adding AI to Snap!

[1] http://www.toontalk.com [2] https://toontalk.github.io/ToonTalk/

We wrote a 3D version of Apple Logo [1] and we're going to be rolling out a tutorial for it for kids + running classes...

[1] https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/help/micrologo/

Logo appeared in a puzzle in this year's MIT Mystery Hunt: https://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2019/puzzle/turtle_power.html

Fun puzzle. Took me back...

  I do not think of myself as a closure or a functor, unlike the Logo programmer and the turtle, but the elements of a language are features of a world I inhabit:

Ahhh... I remember LOGO on Apple ][e's Apple donated to the elementary school I attended.

Random Q: Why was that light on Apple's keyboard invariably uncomfortably hot?