Ruby and Logo?

ruby-talk
1

Anybody remember Logo, a teaching language from the 80's? Its big plus was
that you could use it to drive a 'turtle' around the floor and draw shapes.

ISTM that Ruby would be an ideal environment for this - either using a
graphical display plus an irb-like shell at the bottom of the screen, or
indeed controlling a real robot turtle.

    fred = Turtle.new
    fred.pendown
    3.times { fred.forward 50; fred.turn 120 }

And of course,

    fred = nil
    GC.start

would make fred disappear into thin air :slight_smile:

But unlike Logo, this would be an introduction to a "real" programming
language. Does anything like this exist already for Ruby?

Cheers,

Brian.

2

Brian Candler ha scritto:

But unlike Logo, this would be an introduction to a "real" programming
language. Does anything like this exist already for Ruby?

at least I can tell you this has been discussed some times in the past,
and on RAA there is
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby_turtles/

wich IIRC was quite functional.

Oh, and BTW, I may be wrong but it seem to me LOGO was just a strange dialect of lisp, and thus maybe a real language by itself :slight_smile:

3

I've actually done a little playing with this idea for a future Ruby Quiz. I've written some code and played around, but just haven't stumbled across the perfect quiz angle yet. I know it's in there though!

James Edward Gray II

···

On Apr 14, 2005, at 10:21 AM, Brian Candler wrote:

Anybody remember Logo, a teaching language from the 80's? Its big plus was
that you could use it to drive a 'turtle' around the floor and draw shapes.

4

I was playing around with netlogo: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

I was impress by its power and simplicity. It is written in Java. So it
might be possible to call its API throught jruby.

This can be a very good way to introduce programming to kids.

5

gabriele renzi wrote:

Oh, and BTW, I may be wrong but it seem to me LOGO was just a strange dialect of lisp, and thus maybe a real language by itself :slight_smile:

Yup, Logo is a bastard child of mama Lisp, and it gets all the respect and support you might expect.

···

--
Glenn Parker | glenn.parker-AT-comcast.net | <http://www.tetrafoil.com/&gt;