Comment by veltas

1 day 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.

18 comments

veltas

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ndiddy  1 day ago

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.

  • HelloNurse  15 hours ago

    > start incorporating DUP and OVER and ROT and PICK and friends

    If one understands adding and consuming values at the top of the stack, putting the stack in the state you want it is certainly a small logical step without new theoretical baggage.

    Word definitions and the accompanying pointer tricks are more likely to be challenging.

    • ndiddy  8 hours ago

      The stack is functionally very simple, but keeping a mental model of what exactly is on it at each point in your code and how to transform it to perform the calculations you need can be tricky.

rbanffy  1 day 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.

  • fuzztester  1 day ago

    lutus also created arachnophilia and sailed or is sailing around the world.

    n coined the term careware. iirc.

    first-hand info. i had downloaded n used arachnophilia.

    he is on hn.

noosphr  1 day ago

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.