Article URL: https://gracefulliberty.com/articles/teaching-kids-forth/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062700 Points: 46 # Comments: 12

Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was ecstatic about this opportunity. I'm passionate about giving people just a bit more control over the potential locked up in the devices they carry with them every day. When people know more about computers in general and about making their own software in particular, whole worlds open up. This gave me the chance to pry the door to that world open for people who likely would have never discovered it otherwise. While I had taught people programming to individuals previously, this was my first experience teaching in a classroom environment. I went from knowing next to nothing about teaching to designing my own curriculum, including lesson plans, curriculum, and a digital learning environment. I could have chose to teach any programming language. I could have chosen Python or Scratch, but I wanted to explore a path less commonly chosen and maybe find some gems that are otherwise overlooked. Because of the limited amount of time I had to teach, and the fact that I wanted to teach more fundamental concepts, I wanted to avoid teaching syntax. While Python makes sense as pseudocode to someone who understands what code is, it is still nearly incomprehensible to new learners, which I discovered in previous years teaching programming one-on-one. I decided I wanted to either teach Forth or Haskell. Forth was appealing because it's a concatenative language. You write the instructions and it simply executes everything in order. As long as you understand what a stack is you can write Forth programs. Haskell was appealing because it integrates well with how students are already taught about how to think about variables and functions in mathematics. I've seen too many new programmers get confused that in programming variables are boxes that can contain any value instead of the algebraic definitions they've learned in math class. I ended up choosing Forth for two reasons. First, it was easier to integrate into a custom learning environment I could prepare for the students. Second, I figured procedural programming would be easier to conceptualize than functional programming for the in-class final demo.