A few years ago, I wrote an esoteric, minimalistic turtle graphics language called CFRS[]: <https://susam.net/cfrs.html>.
This was an exercise in making a turtle graphics language that is as minimal as possible. It is closer to Brainfsck than JavaScript and it is not Turing complete, by design.
Was this with the little turle as your cursor? Seeing the "older" kids who could manipulate that program/language to make stopmotion movies might have been the moment that set me on the path of "technology enthusiast" for the rest of my life. The scene of the dimmed computer lab with a whole group gathered around someone's monitor to watch the newest creation is forever etched in my memory.
It was! I even remember it was Terrapin LOGO - which amazingly seems to still be around. [0]
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
That’s really cool! In adulthood I’ve learned about Seymour Papert and LOGO but I was never exposed to it when I was young. We did have early 90’s Macs in grade school.
(and yes, the full name (3-Dimension Model Turtle) does have the same number of syllables as a certain for letter franchise staring beings named for a certain quartet named after Italian Renaissance artists)
It's a weird feeling. I'm starting to loathe the very art I used to admire and spend lot of hours to create. It's like the Gulliver story where people were fed with lots of tasty food, by the monster.
I stumbled over your string art turtle some time ago
and like one of the commenters on [1], I was wondering about your tool to create points from a image
Thanks! If you wanna do more, i wrote a bit about it on x/twitter, recently 3d printed an object to actually test such string art. if you have specific questions, happy to answer ofc!
https://x.com/mknol/status/1993708617586077928
Nice collection, lots of variety. For "Fake Hyperbolic Plane..." [1] I can suggest looking up the Method of Apollonius, in order to make the circles all touch without overlapping or gaps.
LOGO was my first interaction with a computer back in 1996. We had to write one program in LOGO in our computer class and we were allowed to play one of the following three games for rest of the period: Dangerous Dave, Paratrooper, or Prince of Persia.
I got an Amstrad PCW handed down to me from my dad as my first PC around the same time.
Booted always with disk 1 and that was Locoscript and learned typing on that thing.
When I discovered there is a second disk that boots you in some dark and hidden alternative mode (read: CP/M) I felt like a hacker.
Hidden inside this cave was the only program the manual mentioned in this section: Logo! I did not know that my PC could display anything except characters and it was. so. amazing. to see self-drawn lines on that thing.
We learned the same lessons for the parts of CPU, computer generations, Babbage and co for 5 years. Our lab exams was more means than ends, so `pir*2` will carry more marks than `3.14r*r`.
To be fair, turtle graphics is not itself Logo, Logo was originally designed for text manipulation (because all schools had at that time were teletype terminals). Then came the idea of a physical turtle robot, then the graphical turtle when schools got computers with CRT displays.
My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)
The LOGO I got to use when I was 12 was practically a micro-Lisp with turtle graphics. JavaScript is a sort of a Lisp. Thus "LOGO lives" seems appropriate to me :)
I want to preface this by noting that as an adult, I totally understand the intent behind LOGO, its use as an educational tool, and understand its historic place in computer history.
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
We did LOGO then some sort of watered down BASIC. Both were incredibly useless to my education because at no point was any serious attempt ever made to teach that these were the tip of any sort of computer programming iceberg. We were simply given lessons and assignments and told to things and we just did them without understanding what we were doing. At least with math they had some example applications for everything they taught us.
Readit News
This was an exercise in making a turtle graphics language that is as minimal as possible. It is closer to Brainfsck than JavaScript and it is not Turing complete, by design.
To see some demos, go to <https://susam.github.io/cfrs/demo.html>.
I have a Forth-inspired, esoteric, stack-based, postfix, colouring language too: <https://susam.net/fxyt.html>
Demos: <https://susam.github.io/fxyt/demo.html>
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
[0] https://www.terrapinlogo.com/
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/tdmt.py
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/threeDmo...
(and yes, the full name (3-Dimension Model Turtle) does have the same number of syllables as a certain for letter franchise staring beings named for a certain quartet named after Italian Renaissance artists)
[1] https://turtletoy.net/turtle/dd4c8beb92
[1] https://turtletoy.net/turtle/0975488621
Where you get 140 characters to draw using code. (Similar as in the resulting pictures reminded me of dwitter)
Booted always with disk 1 and that was Locoscript and learned typing on that thing.
When I discovered there is a second disk that boots you in some dark and hidden alternative mode (read: CP/M) I felt like a hacker.
Hidden inside this cave was the only program the manual mentioned in this section: Logo! I did not know that my PC could display anything except characters and it was. so. amazing. to see self-drawn lines on that thing.
We learned the same lessons for the parts of CPU, computer generations, Babbage and co for 5 years. Our lab exams was more means than ends, so `pir*2` will carry more marks than `3.14r*r`.
(This was around 2005 for me!)
My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)
That's very cool!
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
I have less than zero nostalgia for either.