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Teaching Kids Forth

105 points by rbanffy

by K0balt

2 subcomments

Assuming you’re teaching programming and not “coding”, forth is a fantastic language to teach.
First it’s easy to understand. Second, it’s completely unopinionated, and you can take it anywhere you want to. To write a program in forth is to create a domain specific language for solving that problem.
Forth embodies functional as well as procedural programming, is a high level class language (not Assembler) yet also if you understand forth, you will pick up assembler very easily. (Unlike, say, JavaScript)
It sits precisely in the sweet spot of a central set off paradigms that, once understood, form a bridge to every kind of computer programming, as well as to a whole bunch of data abstractions at a low level.
It might even be the -only- language that people who will learn to program using AI would have to learn, as long as they went deep. At that point they could conceptually work with high level descriptions of what they intended for the coding agent to create, without having the underpinnings be completely opaque, regardless of the actual language used.

by jeberle

2 subcomments

Leo Brodie's "Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals" is well-suited for any level student. It's quite fun and made a mark on my thinking. It's hard for a postfix dereference operator not to.

by veltas

5 subcomments

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.

by sudb

3 subcomments

I doubly enjoyed reading this because I feel like I'm reasonably sure the author never ran this through an LLM because of the "cirriculum" typo.

by 6581

0 subcomment

From personal experience, I strongly disagree with the negative comments saying Forth isn't suitable for teaching children.
"Starting Forth" by Leo Brodie was the first programming book I ever read when I was about 6 or 7 years old, after my dad brought it home from work (where they used Forth). To me, the language felt very intuitive and easy to grasp. And Brodie's illustrations helped a lot with visualizing how it all worked.

by lebuffon

1 subcomments

I used Forth to explain numbers in different radices to my grandson. Being able to interactively try things at the console was really helpful. It also helps to separate the internal number in the machine from how we display it, due to the different operators to print numbers as signed or unsigned. This is something that I have seen young programmers confuse.
I think another area where Forth can help young people is in understanding some low level details like memory addresses and reading and writing memory. It seems simpler than abstracting it to "pointers", more like assembler but interactive.

by bolangi

0 subcomment

Decker, a hypercard style app, seems to give quick gratification. Looks like an easy and fun way to get started with programming. Was just posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060856

by cameldrv

0 subcomment

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.

by rwmj

1 subcomments

I wonder if Logo wouldn't be better for kids, especially if you could pair it with a real "turtle".

by NotGMan

1 subcomments

OP is speedrunning how to make kids hate programming.
This language is simple unintuitive and the Polish math notation will cause even more confusion.
>> Overall, I don't believe the programming language matters all too much.
Delusional. There is a reason why 99.99% of large projects are done in imperative languages.
I like programming a lot but if my programming journey were started by this teacher and might just became a chef instead.
This seems to be a "do novel things for novelty sake" thing.
Kids need to see the practical applications in the simples and most intuitive way of the things they are learning.
Forth or similar languages are not it.
Even in university level students these languages are both confusing and unintuitive and slow to develop in compared to imperative languages.

by AI_hacker

0 subcomment

[dead]

by hecreto

1 subcomments

[flagged]

by pbgcp2026

1 subcomments

All things considered, unfortunately, we are better off teaching them plumbing or painting ...

by sieste

1 subcomments

> I wanted to avoid teaching syntax. While Python makes sense as pseudocode [...] it is still nearly incomprehensible to new learners [...] I decided I wanted to either teach Forth or Haskell.
Sorry but this reads like a joke. If you find python incomprehensible, Forth and Haskell won't even register as languages.

by q2dg

1 subcomments

Why not Processing or P5.js?

0 subcomment