Monkeyfist.com: A "PG-13" version of Logo

I've dorked around with earlier, Mac only, versions of StarLogo, and it is neat. I haven't actually programmed in Logo, though it seems to be an unobjectionable language. I did play with the supplied examples and there's plenty to get out of them alone, without ever constructing your own projects.

Logo essentially is a simple Lisp designed for teaching programming to young children. The classic hook of Logo has always been its support for "turtle graphics" (often with a cute little turtle). So kids can get immediate visual feedback from their commands (go right 10 , go left20, turn around, get soused, etc.)

StarLogo takes this to the nth-degree. Instead of one lonely, little turtle, you have a veritable turtle horde: thousands of the mighty beasts, all working in parallel, at your command. Furthermore, the turtles are sensitive to the state of the background (which you also can program as being made up of little "patches"). Given these tools, building a, for example, SimAnt type model is straightforward and fairly simple.

The explicit point of all this is to explore "decentralized systems":

In decentralized systems, orderly patterns can arise without centralized control. Increasingly, researchers are choosing decentralized models for the organizations and technologies that they construct in the world, and for the theories that they construct about the world. But many people continue to resist these ideas, assuming centralized control where none exists--for example, assuming (incorrectly) that bird flocks have leaders. StarLogo is designed to help students (as well as researchers) develop new ways of thinking about and understanding decentralized systems. Of course, the classic (my, I do love that word) computer science example is the Game of Life. There, simple rules for the life and death of "cells" arranged in a rectangular grid produce diverse and often surprisingly life-like patterns.

I'll note two small disappointments with this new StarLogo package:

It doesn't come ready to run as many projects as MacStarLogo did (and still does!) In particular, my two favorite simulations are missing: "Fire" (a model of forest fires) and "Flu" (a model of epidemics. Both of these dramatically illustrate the "tipping point" phenomenon--for example, adding more and more trees doesn't change the pattern or likelihood of a fire much until you reach a certain density. Right after that point, a small starting fire wipes out the whole forest. This notion has been used to explain the seeming lack of progress in "crime fighting", among other things.
The projects don't seem to contain the explanatory text anymore. I'll concede that the htmlized pages are much prettier, but it was really handy to have the explanations "at hand" as it t'were.

But these are minor, packaging quibbles. If you enjoyed any Sim-game, you'll probably have a ball with StarLogo. Oh, yeah, and there's that learning aspect, too. (Try out the traffic jam one and you'll learn to really detest onlooker delays.)