Teaching Kids Forth • Hacker News Board

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#21

Post by ndiddy » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:07 AM UTC

veltas wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#22

Post by assimpleaspossi » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

pbgcp2026 wrote: post #20

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

Or just concentrate on reading writing and 'rithmetic and let them find a career they want that isn't forced on them

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#23

Post by songhonglei1985 » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

veltas wrote: post #2

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.

[flagged]

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#24

Post by bolangi » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

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

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#25

Post by fuzztester » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #4

veltas wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#26

Post by lebuffon » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 3:16 AM UTC

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.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#27

Post by pitchlatte » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:55 AM UTC

noosphr wrote: post #18

veltas wrote: post #2

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.

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.

what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#28

Post by sieste » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 5:23 AM UTC

> 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.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#29

Post by dgrabla » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:36 AM UTC

sudb wrote: post #16

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.

I thought it was made on purpose so people have something xtra to chat about. Clever.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#30

Post by veltas » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:37 AM UTC

sudb wrote: post #16

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.

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'.