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)
[delayed]
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.
Why 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
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.