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 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.
ndiddy 6 hours 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.
noosphr 6 hours 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.
pitchlatte 3 hours ago [-]
what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?
cultofmetatron 15 minutes ago [-]
probably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.
pitchlatte 3 minutes ago [-]
that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.
9 hours ago [-]
rbanffy 10 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 8 hours ago [-]
Well that’s next weekend sorted, thanks!
fuzztester 5 hours 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.
songhonglei1985 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lebuffon 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sudb 8 hours 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.
veltas 37 minutes ago [-]
This is exactly the kind of spelling mistake ChatGPT makes if you ask it to make spelling mistakes to make text look more authentic.
What seems to happen is it will get a lot of words like curriculum wrong that people rarely spell incorrectly because they're long enough that if your English isn't confident you would look it up or use a spell checker, or spell words incorrectly that people don't usually spell wrong like 'imediate' or 'puzzel'.
gracefulliberty 19 minutes ago [-]
Let it be known that this is a spelling mistake I have made for years. I thought I had rooted out of this article. It must have made it back in with later drafts.
veltas 5 minutes ago [-]
To be clear, I'm not accusing you of plagiarism at all. I'm just saying this kind of typo unfortunately doesn't prove anything.
dgrabla 38 minutes ago [-]
I thought it was made on purpose so people have something xtra to chat about. Clever.
encomiast 7 hours ago [-]
Because it occurred more than once, my first thought was it must be a British variant. But I guess not.
WillAdams 6 hours ago [-]
The u and i keys are adjacent, so it's a plausible typo.
bolangi 6 hours ago [-]
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
cameldrv 10 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.
sieste 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
q2dg 9 hours ago [-]
Why not Processing or P5.js?
peesem 8 hours 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 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hecreto 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
beyonddream 10 hours ago [-]
Why ?
Loughla 9 hours 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.
pbgcp2026 6 hours ago [-]
All things considered, unfortunately, we are better off teaching them plumbing or painting ...
assimpleaspossi 6 hours ago [-]
Or just concentrate on reading writing and 'rithmetic and let them find a career they want that isn't forced on them
10 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 08:14:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
n coined the term careware. iirc.
first-hand info. i had downloaded n used arachnophilia.
he is on hn.
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.
What seems to happen is it will get a lot of words like curriculum wrong that people rarely spell incorrectly because they're long enough that if your English isn't confident you would look it up or use a spell checker, or spell words incorrectly that people don't usually spell wrong like 'imediate' or 'puzzel'.
Sorry but this reads like a joke. If you find python incomprehensible, Forth and Haskell won't even register as languages.