Teaching Kids Forth

(gracefulliberty.com)

39 points | by rbanffy 3 hours ago

8 comments

  • sudb 7 minutes ago
    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.
  • jeberle 48 minutes ago
    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.
  • cameldrv 2 hours 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.

      • JSR_FDED 18 minutes ago
        Well that’s next weekend sorted, thanks!
  • q2dg 1 hour ago
    Why not Processing or P5.js?
    • peesem 50 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
  • AI_hacker 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • hecreto 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • beyonddream 2 hours ago
      Why ?
      • Loughla 1 hour 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.