Comment by NotGMan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotGMan | Hacker News Reader

OP is speedrunning how to make kids hate programming.

This language is simple unintuitive and the Polish math notation will cause even more confusion.

>> Overall, I don't believe the programming language matters all too much.

Delusional. There is a reason why 99.99% of large projects are done in imperative languages.

I like programming a lot but if my programming journey were started by this teacher and might just became a chef instead.

This seems to be a "do novel things for novelty sake" thing.

Kids need to see the practical applications in the simples and most intuitive way of the things they are learning.

Forth or similar languages are not it.

Even in university level students these languages are both confusing and unintuitive and slow to develop in compared to imperative languages.

I don't know.

It's got some extremely simple rules. 1 data structure. And nothing is particularly hidden.

Python might be better for actually producing something, but from a 'teaching how computers work' pov, forth would seem to have it's merits. Python hides a lot of stuff, thus we have a situation where people think compilers and interpreters are magical things. If you don't care how the computer works, that's fine, but personally I'd like to teach my kid how a computer works, not how to use some programming language.

>> but personally I'd like to teach my kid how a computer works, not how to use some programming language.

I wonder if assembly is a better choice... hmmm...

Well one can follow on from the other.

Assembly is add R1 R2. Forth takes the 2 numbers from the TOS and puts it in those registers. That wasn't obvious what was happening in the post, I wonder if student me would have wondered.

You could make the case for going all the way down to the silicon.

We teach English, maths, science to give a rounded understanding, not to make student productive or give them information that will be immediately useful. IT/computing in secondary school should be doing a similar thing. It should remove the mystery of what a computer is. That it is programmable. Hopefully it's improved since I was young and we were basically shown how to use Excel.

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