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Teaching Kids Forth

gracefulliberty.com

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Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#31

Post by gracefulliberty »

veltas wrote: post #30
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 li…

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.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#32

Post by cultofmetatron »

pitchlatte wrote: post #27
noosphr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

probably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#33

Post by veltas »

gracefulliberty wrote: post #31
veltas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

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.

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.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#34

Post by pitchlatte »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #32
pitchlatte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

probably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.

that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#35

Post by rbanffy »

fuzztester wrote: post #25
rbanffy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paul Lutus is a treasure of humankind.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#36

Post by lioeters »

pitchlatte wrote: post #34
cultofmetatron wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.

that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.

The need to remember operator precedence is a consequence of the infix notation syntax.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#37

Post by NotGMan »

OP is speedrunning how to make kids hate programming.

This language is simple unintuitive and the Polish math notation will cause even more confusion.

>> Overall, I don't believe the programming language matters all too much.

Delusional. There is a reason why 99.99% of large projects are done in imperative languages.

I like programming a lot but if my programming journey were started by this teacher and might just became a chef instead.

This seems to be a "do novel things for novelty sake" thing.

Kids need to see the practical applications in the simples and most intuitive way of the things they are learning.

Forth or similar languages are not it.

Even in university level students these languages are both confusing and unintuitive and slow to develop in compared to imperative languages.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#38

Post by 6581 »

From personal experience, I strongly disagree with the negative comments saying Forth isn't suitable for teaching children.

"Starting Forth" by Leo Brodie was the first programming book I ever read when I was about 6 or 7 years old, after my dad brought it home from work (where they used Forth). To me, the language felt very intuitive and easy to grasp. And Brodie's illustrations helped a lot with visualizing how it all worked.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#39

Post by benj111 »

NotGMan wrote: post #37

OP is speedrunning how to make kids hate programming. This language is simple unintuitive and the Polish math notation will cause even more confusion. >> Overall, I don't believe the programming language matters all too much. Delusional. There is a reason why 99.99% of large projects are done in imperative languages. I like programming a lot but if my programming journey were started by this teacher and might just be…

I don't know.

It's got some extremely simple rules. 1 data structure. And nothing is particularly hidden.

Python might be better for actually producing something, but from a 'teaching how computers work' pov, forth would seem to have it's merits. Python hides a lot of stuff, thus we have a situation where people think compilers and interpreters are magical things. If you don't care how the computer works, that's fine, but personally I'd like to teach my kid how a computer works, not how to use some programming language.

Re: Teaching Kids Forth

#40

Post by antonvs »

lioeters wrote: post #36
pitchlatte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.

The need to remember operator precedence is a consequence of the infix notation syntax.

It’s a tradeoff against lots of irritating silly parentheses.
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