Logo, Lisp and Me

By the time I moved to a new school (Don Bosco School, Siliguri) in Grade 5, they had stopped teaching LOGO. So, my journey with computers in any form started with GW BASIC. So, I had no idea about what LOGO was except that it was fun. I did not have a computer so early and by the time I got it, I was too old (!!) for learning LOGO.

Some things have changed now, however. After 14 years have passed, I don't think that I am too old, any more! My 10 year old sister is learning LOGO in her 4th grade (Saint Joseph's School, Matigara) and I want to teach her to program LOGO on the computer. So I began my LOGO learning journey..

The first things I saw startled me:

• Its a dialect of Lisp
• Seymour Papert was one of the developers

To top it all:

"Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and a continually evolving family of programming languages that aid in its realization."

- Harold Abelson
Apple Logo, 1982

Never lose the child like wonder- said Randy Pausch in his last lecture. Well, I am 24 and I hope computers will continue startling me for many years to come!