Teaching Kids Forth
18 points by liberty
18 points by liberty
I adore Forth. I agree with the conclusion that Forth may not be the best option for teaching, but it's important for programmers to be exposed to a wide variety of different paradigms.
Easy Forth looks like a good resource. I encourage every programmer to take ten minutes out of their day give Forth a shot sometime, it's the simplest language in the world to learn and it's simultaneously familiar and mind-bending. An implementation of Forth is also trivial as well, if you ever find yourself in desperate need of implementing a high-level language from scratch.
Most of Forth is trival, but there are bits (like DOES>) that are not so trivial.
Also, while I find it fun to implement Forth, the more Forth code I wrote, the less I liked it. It's the noise words like DUP, ROT, and SWAP that make it hard (in my opinion) to follow what's going on. That, and Forth encourages global variables, which I'm not fond of.
I agree. While I do adore Forth, that does not necessarily mean that I'd want to use it for most of what I write. Still, I think most programmers should give it a try for a toy project, the investment required to learn it is extremely low and you'll get to add one more paradigm to your toolbox.
Exposing kids and teenagers to "non mainstream" computing tools and languages is a good way to teach them the wideness of this field and the different approaches that could be used when solving a problem. Good work.