I began coding in IBM/LCSI PC Logo. The first line of code I ever wrote was:
FD 100
That's the "hello, world" of turtle graphics in Logo. While probably not as beautiful as the several splendid examples posted in this thread, that simple line of code changed my world. I could make stuff happen in an otherwise mostly blank monochrome CRT display. Until then I had seen CRTs in televisions where I had very little control on what I see on the screen. But now, I had control. The turtle became my toy and I could make it draw anything on a 320 x 250 canvas.
The next beautiful piece of code I came across in the same language was:
REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1]
The code above draws an approximation of a circle by combining 360 short line segments. It showed me how control flow can be used elegantly to express complex ideas in a simple expression. And then I came across this:
At an impressionable age of 9, reading and writing code like this, and using simple arithmetic, geometry, logic, and code to manipulate a two-dimensional world had a lasting effect on me. I like to believe that my passion for software engineering as well as my love for writing code, sharing code, and open source development are a result of coming across these beautiful code examples early in my life.
The true beauty of Logo comes in the realization that you can add your own words to it, and that all these specialist words you devise are themselves first-class citizens of the language, of syntax and status equal to its generic builtins. Hence:
TO CIRCLE
REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1]
END
TO FLOWER
REPEAT 20 [CIRCLE RT 18]
END
and so on ad infinitum, until you arrive at a complete custom vocabulary that concisely and precisely expresses the particular concepts and behaviors of interest and importance to you. In doing so, you move from thinking algorithmically (which is glorified spaghetti) to thinking compositionally, which is the key to scalability – managing complexity as your needs and ambitions grow.
Whereas Algol-y languages treat user-defined vocabulary as second-class citizens, beneath their own privileged built-ins. Which is a ridiculous of status when you consider which is actually important to the user: precise, powerful, tailored words that describe their particular problem, or the crude primitive undifferentiated building blocks that the language dumps out of the box?
The beauty of bottom-up programming (as any Lisp fule kno:) is that endlessly tests your own understanding of the problem domain: to define effective, productive words you must have some idea of what you’re talking about; you can’t help but learn the foundations of the problem space as you go. There’s a basic humility to this approach; there’s nowhere to hide laziness or ignorance.
Whereas in top-down programming it’s much too easy for highly-educated highly-paid absolute know-nothings to bullshit eternally, constructing great theatrical class architectures; grand mechanical castles in the sky that look all very difficult and impressive to observers while never saying anything relevant or useful.
That key switch from algorithmic to compositional thinking is not a natural conceptual leap for self-learners – it takes a carefully directed prod at a particular point in the learning curve to jump those rails – but it opens up worlds. #PlatosCave
Thanks for writing this. I think you've explained why I've always liked the ability to invoke functions without parentheses. I always thought it simply appealed to my sense of aesthetics, and I've had somewhat of a hard time defending it but now that you mention it, building my own first-class primitives is a big part of it.
Oh man, PC Logo takes me back down the memory lane. We were introduced to PC Logo in 4th grade, that's about 9 years ago. I instantly fell in love with it. The amount of power I had over the computer - ordering it to draw what I want, how I want was really exciting.
My father had installed Kubuntu on our home computer which had an amazing suite of educational applications, including KTurtle which was (almost) the same as PC Logo. I got so addicted to it, my father suggested me to create a blog and regularly update it with the drawings and the code for it. And so I did [1]! I used Google Blogpost (that was the thing back then). Good times :).
I still remember my father ‘explaining’ me Pythagoras theorem when I was around 5 to show me how to draw the roof of a house on our hand-soldered Philips Apple II clone.
I’ve been hooked ever since.
The best thing was that 25 years later I opened a Logo emulator again and when faced with having to clean the screen somewhere deep, deep from my muscle memory the right command sprang forward: CLEAR
For all the Logo fans in this thread, I have created a Slack workspace here for us to get together: https://bit.ly/fd100slackinvite
Please do join it even if you don't remember Logo anymore. The intention here is not to discuss Logo but to share the joy of computing that we discovered through Logo and has remained in our lives. I hope to see you all there. :-)
By the way, there is also #fd100 channel on Freenode IRC but I am not sure whether most HN users prefer IRC or Slack.
How my, so many souvenirs. Especially the one when our teacher took us to the courtyard and had us do the turtle in real life, him giving the instructions.
The next beautiful piece of code I came across in the same language was:
The code above draws an approximation of a circle by combining 360 short line segments. It showed me how control flow can be used elegantly to express complex ideas in a simple expression. And then I came across this: The above code draws 20 overlapping circles. The output looks like this: https://susam.in/files/blog/dosbox-logo-1.png .At an impressionable age of 9, reading and writing code like this, and using simple arithmetic, geometry, logic, and code to manipulate a two-dimensional world had a lasting effect on me. I like to believe that my passion for software engineering as well as my love for writing code, sharing code, and open source development are a result of coming across these beautiful code examples early in my life.