Teaching Kids Forth

(gracefulliberty.com)

31 points | by rbanffy 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • jeberle 4 minutes ago
    [delayed]
  • cameldrv 1 hour ago
    Writing RPL on my HP48 as a young teenager influenced the way I thought about programming significantly. RPL IMO is underrated as an educational tool. It introduces the stack based concept, but also the "everything is an object" concept. As a useful language I'm not sure, but it was definitely fun to think about.
  • q2dg 43 minutes ago
    Why not Processing or P5.js?
    • peesem 6 minutes ago
      did you read the post? it doesn't mention those by name but the reasons it gives for not teaching other languages/tools apply to those too
  • veltas 2 hours ago
    I really love Forth and spend almost all my free programming time playing with it and I'd never teach it to a class of kids.
    • andy99 25 minutes ago
      Why?

      If setting a whole curriculum I see why forth wouldn’t be the only thing to teach. If you have an opportunity to do a course I think it’s one interesting way to teach some concepts in a different way. People will get scripting language exposure somewhere else, as the author said, Forth is a way to teach programming concepts without getting bogged down in syntax - one can focus purely on the mechanics of how a program is interpreted.

      It’s similar imo to SICP (if it’s still taught) being in scheme, it’s extremely impractical from a “job skills” perspective but allows to focus purely on computer science concepts which is great.

      To be honest, the author has Haskell as a second choice, that would be a much tougher sell to me, I feel like it has a ton of baggage you need to learn to even get started (I don’t know any Haskell)

    • rbanffy 2 hours ago
      My kid was curious about my HP-35 and I taught them how it works. They got it in no time and I made it an exercise to rewrite math expressions in RPN.

      Not sure they are that interested in programming, but FORTH is a little sweet language.

      My first experience with it was Paul Lutus’ GraFORTH. On the Apple II it was ridiculously fast.

  • AI_hacker 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • hecreto 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • beyonddream 2 hours ago
      Why ?
      • Loughla 56 minutes ago
        I'm betting the mask and pronouns. Because no one can do anything anymore, even if that thing has zero impact on anyone else, without having their mental fitness attacked.