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.

To see some demos, go to <https://susam.github.io/cfrs/demo.html>.

computer goes [[[[BRRRRRRRRRR]]]]

Interesting project. I guess you know Forth as well? :)

Yes, I do! <https://github.com/susam/may4>

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>

Such a nice project!! I made several turtles too, check https://turtletoy.net/user/markknol

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

[1] https://turtletoy.net/turtle/dd4c8beb92

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

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.

When I was seven I wrote a LOGO program on our school's Apple IIe to tile the (green monochrome) monitor with hexagons. It's all been downhill since.

I made a “circle” but you could see the pixels. I can’t see the pixels anymore.

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.

Similar: https://www.dwitter.net/

Where you get 140 characters to draw using code. (Similar as in the resulting pictures reminded me of dwitter)

https://tixy.land/ is another where the constraints encourage creativity. A lot of these tools are a little like tiny demoscene.

That is really interesting. Pity half of them use a "eval(unescape(escape(x)).replace(/u../g,'')))" with a compressor and decoder function.

LOGO lives!

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.

Did we both study in Greets, Kochi?

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`.

LOGO and Dangerous Dave were my childhood. I never was able to complete DAVE :(

(This was around 2005 for me!)

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 :)

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.

I have less than zero nostalgia for either.

This is so neat. I quite like this one: https://turtletoy.net/turtle/782a9f5329

I wish you could export these in higher res and 16:9, would make good background images

Yes there’s one I’d like to print out. There must be some way to render this at higher res. Does anyone know?

Click on the drawing that you like on the website, then click the download button and choose "Export as SVG". You can then open the SVG file in Inkscape and render as PNG/JPG at any resolution you want. Let me know if you need help.

you can download each as an SVG and then render it out at any resolution using something like inkscape

No screenshots?!

Not clear nor simple. Imo negligible use for teaching. If you know how to import modules and use library functions then you don't need LOGO anymore...

'KEYWORD(50)'

is always simpler than:

' turtle.function(value, value)'

Great project but missed the opportunity to develop your own LOGO interpreter from scratch in web assembly:)

It's build with JavaScript which is pretty common, makes it pretty accessible. Syntax is pretty easy to learn https://turtletoy.net/syntax

turtletoy was made back around 2018 before web assembly was generally available.

> Great project but missed the opportunity to develop your own LOGO interpreter from scratch in web assembly:)

There is one! We wrote it in Golang and compiled it to WebAssembly, it's a greatly extended version of Apple Logo ][:

https://turtlespaces.org

turtlespaces seemss ded

This is really cool. Ive been thinking a lot about how to make a Turing complete visual language.

HAHA it brings back memories!

Can't I slow down the drawing to watch it work?

you actually can but it is a workaround: You can export as gif, then it'll draw slowly

i made some art on this site years ago. some people used this to make plottable art. plotting it is definitely a slower way to watch it work through a drawing :)

This is what "computer art" and "generative art" meant for decades: relatively short programs generating interesting pictures. Today's text-to-image models are quite different from that.

(But I think even for diffusion models, interesting pictures that come from very short or unspecific prompts are more in the spirit of classic generative art, as they don't try to describe specific details explicitly.)

LOGO on Apple IIs was my very first experience with programming. Seeing this puts a huge smile on my face.

Another addition to the Logo tree https://pavel.it.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/logotree/table.html

Great stuff, kind of like the turtle graphics library for p5.js.

If you want to create much fancier graphics (and games!) in actual Logo, check out turtleSpaces:

https://turtlespaces.org

turtlespaces seems dead