Python Turtle Graphics

A couple weeks ago, I was telling some people about the Logo programming language from Seymour Papert, how much of an impact it had on my formative years as a great educational tool: not just for programming, but also for math, geometry and simply "logic" in general. I kept that conversation in my mind for a while and then I started to wonder how cool it would be to write a simple set of Logo commands to be used from a Python prompt. Nothing fancy, just a small module that would allow one to do something like this:

from pylogo import *

And then proceed to combining regular Python commands with calls to forward(), right() and other common Logo commands right away. For the sake of simplicity, the module would take care of managing a simple tkinter-powered window with the Logo graphics in it.

I eventually saved some time to proceed implementing that idea. And I think it was around the first 5 minutes of writing the very few first blocks of my boilerplate code, I ran into an "issue". I got this warning from Pylance:

"turtle.py" is overriding the stdlib module "turtle"

I actually paused there for a while, reading that multiple times to make sure I didn't need new glasses. Like, what? Does Python's standard library have a "turtle" module? What's that? What would that even do?! And then after a quick search on Ecosia, I found out about this:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

That's right. Python has its own Logo implementation, a.k.a. "Python Turtle Graphics". And apparently, this is not new to Python 3, it's been there since Python 2 at least. I mean, how amazing is that? And how incredible it is that four decades after enjoying Logo as a kid on 8bit MSX computers, I somehow become a Python developer along that journey, and then now I discover Python has its own "Logo" implementation embedded in it? I can only believe this story because I have just lived it.

You can try it yourself, right now, on your own computer:

  • open a terminal
  • enter "python" and hit enter
  • copy and paste these simple instructions there:


from turtle import *

for steps in range(3):
forward(100)
right(120)

You should see a triangle in a canvas window. The code basically says: repeat 3 times moving a 100 pixels forward and turning 120 degrees to the right on each step.

If this episode did not confirm to me how much of a great programming language (and also a tool, in general) Python is, nothing will. And I'm now really looking forward to showing some "turtle graphics" to the next enthusiastic kid that approaches me with curiosity about computing and programming (and math, and geometry, the list goes forever on).

That's it. I hope you enjoyed learning that Python is full of surprises and having just a little taste of what Logo can do. And Python never ceases to amaze us in a very positive way.

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