Writing RPL on my HP48 as a young teenager influenced the way I thought about programming significantly. RPL IMO is underrated as an educational tool. It introduces the stack based concept, but also the "everything is an object" concept. As a useful language I'm not sure, but it was definitely fun to think about.
If setting a whole curriculum I see why forth wouldn’t be the only thing to teach. If you have an opportunity to do a course I think it’s one interesting way to teach some concepts in a different way. People will get scripting language exposure somewhere else, as the author said, Forth is a way to teach programming concepts without getting bogged down in syntax - one can focus purely on the mechanics of how a program is interpreted.
It’s similar imo to SICP (if it’s still taught) being in scheme, it’s extremely impractical from a “job skills” perspective but allows to focus purely on computer science concepts which is great.
To be honest, the author has Haskell as a second choice, that would be a much tougher sell to me, I feel like it has a ton of baggage you need to learn to even get started (I don’t know any Haskell)
Writing RPL on my HP48 as a young teenager influenced the way I thought about programming significantly. RPL IMO is underrated as an educational tool. It introduces the stack based concept, but also the "everything is an object" concept. As a useful language I'm not sure, but it was definitely fun to think about.
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.
Why?
If setting a whole curriculum I see why forth wouldn’t be the only thing to teach. If you have an opportunity to do a course I think it’s one interesting way to teach some concepts in a different way. People will get scripting language exposure somewhere else, as the author said, Forth is a way to teach programming concepts without getting bogged down in syntax - one can focus purely on the mechanics of how a program is interpreted.
It’s similar imo to SICP (if it’s still taught) being in scheme, it’s extremely impractical from a “job skills” perspective but allows to focus purely on computer science concepts which is great.
To be honest, the author has Haskell as a second choice, that would be a much tougher sell to me, I feel like it has a ton of baggage you need to learn to even get started (I don’t know any Haskell)
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.
Why not Processing or P5.js?