Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah kids hate syntax
Also pretty sure that kids won’t ever have to deal with syntax lol. For better or for worse, Human language is the new programming language, it’s just a specialised dialect and field. I do worry that by teaching coding and not programming we are shooting kids in the foot though. You need to ba able to leverage deep insight to lead coding agent swarms to create actually good codebases.
Teaching Kids Forth
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#62Why not Processing or P5.js?
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
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#63Assuming you’re teaching programming and not “coding”, forth is a fantastic language to teach. First it’s easy to understand. Second, it’s completely unopinionated, and you can take it anywhere you want to. To write a program in forth is to create a domain specific language for solving that problem. Forth embodies functional as well as procedural programming, is a high level class language (not Assembler) yet also if…
What is the difference between programming and coding? In my mind they're synonymous.
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also pretty sure that kids won’t ever have to deal with syntax lol. For better or for worse, Human language is the new programming language, it’s just a specialised dialect and field. I do worry that by teaching coding and not programming we are shooting kids in the foot though. You need to ba able to leverage deep insight to lead coding agent swarms to create actually good codebases.
that's why most popular languages (python in particular) are the worst of all worlds - if english is the "programming language" why not use a good runtime?
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python turtle with logo parser and 3D support https://github.com/tkfoss/pylogo3d/tree/main#pylogo3d
Are there physical turtles available? Good for kids to take home an actual plot from their classes.
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#66Assuming you’re teaching programming and not “coding”, forth is a fantastic language to teach. First it’s easy to understand. Second, it’s completely unopinionated, and you can take it anywhere you want to. To write a program in forth is to create a domain specific language for solving that problem. Forth embodies functional as well as procedural programming, is a high level class language (not Assembler) yet also if…
What is the difference between programming and coding? In my mind they're synonymous.
Coding is writing code to solve a problem. Someone can “know how to code” in one language, and have a very hard time moving away from that language because they understand the symbols more than the ideas.
Programming is approaching a problem space as a system specification problem and solving it with an algorithmic solution, and it doesn’t matter what language you use because you are approaching it from the symantic direction rather than the syntactic one.
You are a programmer when all languages are roughly similar to you, even though you may be much more familiar with the syntax of one than you are with others.
You are a coder when you can write programs, maybe even complicated ones, but you think of the solution in terms of a computer language rather than data structures, transformations, and state machines.
Most people start as coders, unless they come from a computer science background, or start out in assembly or with a little extra push, languages like forth. If you keep going and start to branch out a bit, most people will become programmers to one degree or another within a few years of working or playing in the field.
In short and to overgeneralise to the extreme, the focus is on the code vs the data.
You can also be so far in to the theoretical side that you are a data scientist or mathematician and a coder, but not really a programmer, even though you are solving complex data and algorithmic problems by programming a computer…. So it’s kinda nuanced? I think maybe it’s a matter of how you think about practical computation? But there’s definitely a difference in the depth of knowledge that crosses some kind of inflection point that is non-linear.
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#67All 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
#68Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forth is very good in this regard, because the word names are short and there is no "fluff" around the syntax if you can even call it syntax. Also there is no need to name your data. Literal numbers can be used just as easily even for memory addresses. However there is no safety net. ;-)
Aside from shooting yourself in the foot, I don't see anything you've shared that can't be done in python.
Re: Teaching Kids Forth
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forth is very good in this regard, because the word names are short and there is no "fluff" around the syntax if you can even call it syntax. Also there is no need to name your data. Literal numbers can be used just as easily even for memory addresses. However there is no safety net. ;-)
Aside from shooting yourself in the foot, I don't see anything you've shared that can't be done in python.