The morning light filters through my blinds as I sip my coffee and stare at my computer screen. Today, I’m feeling nostalgic. Twenty years into my programming career, and here I am, revisiting Logo—the language that started it all for me. My colleagues at the office often tease me about my “vintage” references, but there’s something about Logo’s simplicity that still resonates with how I approach programming challenges today.
I remember being ten years old, watching that little triangle—the “turtle“—move across the screen, leaving lines in its wake. “FORWARD 100, RIGHT 90” and suddenly, I was drawing. It wasn’t just code; it was magic that I controlled. Today, I’m implementing a visualization module for our company’s data analysis tool, and I find myself thinking, “How would Logo handle this?”
Logo – The Beauty of Spatial Thinking
In my current role developing software architecture for Jakt’s financial analysis platform, I often find myself sketching problems before coding them. It’s a habit I developed from those early Logo days. Our team was stuck on a particularly complex data flow issue last week, and I surprised everyone by breaking out colored markers and drawing a diagram that looked suspiciously like turtle paths.
“Michele, are you turning our million-dollar project into kindergarten art?” my project manager joked.
“Just wait,” I replied, drawing arrows and pathways. “See how the data needs to navigate these decision points? It’s just like programming a turtle to avoid obstacles.”
Twenty minutes later, we had clarity. The visual representation helped everyone see the bottlenecks. Logo taught me that sometimes, the most sophisticated problems need the simplest representations. When you can visualize logic spatially, you can communicate it more effectively.
Logo – From REPEAT Loops to Modern Recursion
This afternoon, I found myself explaining recursive functions to our new junior developer. I pulled up an old Logo program I’d saved—a simple snowflake pattern that uses recursion to create increasingly detailed fractal patterns.
“But why not just use a for-loop?” he asked, looking confused.
I smiled, remembering asking my own computer teacher the same question decades ago. “Logo taught me that recursion isn’t just a programming technique—it’s a way of seeing patterns in the world,” I explained. “Look at how each branch of the snowflake contains smaller versions of the same pattern. That’s how nature works.”
What’s remarkable is how this philosophical approach to code structures has influenced my debugging process. When something breaks in our codebase, I instinctively look for repeating patterns rather than isolated bugs. Just yesterday, I identified a memory leak that others had missed because I recognized a recursive pattern in how our objects were being created and (not) destroyed.
Lists and Lambdas: Logo’s Hidden Legacy
Many programmers don’t realize that Logo is a dialect of Lisp, one of the most influential programming languages ever created. My morning routine often includes reviewing code that uses functional programming concepts—higher-order functions, anonymous functions, and list manipulations—all concepts that were baked into Logo’s design.
I still remember my amazement discovering that Logo could handle lists of words and sentences, not just turtle commands. Today, as I manipulate data transformations in our backend systems, I catch myself thinking in terms of those Logo list operations.
“Why do you always break problems down into these tiny, composable functions?” our lead developer asked me during today’s code review.
“Because turtles can only understand simple commands,” I replied, only half-joking. The truth is, Logo’s approach to composition—building complex behaviors from simple ones—remains one of the most powerful concepts in software design.
Teaching Through Technology
One of the most fulfilling parts of my week is Wednesday evenings, when I teach a coding class for kids at the local community center. I start them with Scratch, a block-based visual language directly descended from Logo’s educational philosophy. But by the third session, I always introduce them to actual Logo.
“This looks old,” complained one ten-year-old last week, wrinkling her nose at the minimal interface.
“Watch this,” I said, typing a few commands that made the turtle draw a spiral. Then I showed them how to modify it to create a star, then a flower.
By the end of the hour, she was experimenting with her own geometric patterns, completely engrossed. “It’s like I’m telling it a story,” she said, “and it draws the story for me.”
That’s exactly what Papert, Solomon, and Feurzeig intended when they created Logo in 1967—a language where learning happens through exploration and play. What amazes me is how this approach translates directly to my professional work. The most elegant solutions often emerge not from rigorous planning but from playful experimentation.
Body-Syntonic Reasoning in Modern Development
Seymour Papert coined the term “body-syntonic reasoning” to describe how Logo allowed children to reason about programming by imagining themselves as the turtle. I’ve found this concept incredibly valuable in my work designing user interfaces.
During yesterday’s UX planning session, we were struggling with a navigation flow that felt unintuitive. I asked the team, “If you were the user, moving through this interface, where would you naturally want to go next?” It was pure turtle thinking—understanding a system by imagining yourself inside it.
Sometimes I wonder if Logo’s influence on my thinking is too pervasive. Is it limiting to approach modern programming challenges through the lens of a 58-year-old educational language? But then I see how the same principles—visual feedback, iterative development, composability, and spatial reasoning—have become cornerstones of modern development practices, and I realize that Logo was simply ahead of its time.
As I shut down my computer this evening, I take one last look at the visualization module I’ve been working on. The colorful data paths winding across the screen remind me of those first turtle drawings. Different technology, same understanding. The turtle still moves FORWARD, even if we call it something else now.
