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.<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>Sorry but this reads like a joke. If you find python incomprehensible, Forth and Haskell won't even register as languages.
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.
Yeah Forth doesn't seem very good as a teaching language. Maybe the "first lesson" part where you're just showing how you can build a toy program from simple words would go well, but any nontrivial project where you have to start incorporating DUP and OVER and ROT and PICK and friends seems like a nightmare to teach to anyone who hasn't programmed before.
Kids need an antidote to the brain damage that is standard mathematical notation. I prefer lisps variadic prefix notation, but if you're just doing fixed arity functions without higher order functions than prefix and post fix are as good as each other, and you don't have the dreaded sea of parenthesis.
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.<p>Not sure they are that interested in programming, but FORTH is a little sweet language.<p>My first experience with it was Paul Lutus’ GraFORTH. On the Apple II it was ridiculously fast.
Well that’s next weekend sorted, thanks!
lutus also created arachnophilia and sailed or is sailing around the world.<p>n coined the term careware. iirc.<p>first-hand info. i had downloaded n used arachnophilia.<p>he is on hn.
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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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060856">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060856</a>
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.
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.
Why not Processing or P5.js?
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All things considered, <i>unfortunately</i>, we are better off teaching them plumbing or painting ...