--- title: Teaching Kids Forth | daily.dev description: A developer shares their experience teaching Forth to middle and high school students over 12 weekly one-hour sessions. The post covers the rationale for... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/teaching-kids-forth-q4ty1fckn twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Teaching Kids Forth | daily.dev og:description: A developer shares their experience teaching Forth to middle and high school students over 12 weekly one-hour sessions. The post covers the rationale for... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/teaching-kids-forth-q4ty1fckn og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Q4tY1fCKN.png og:image:alt: Teaching Kids Forth og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Teaching Kids Forth **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 11 min read · 4 upvotes · 2 comments ## Summary A developer shares their experience teaching Forth to middle and high school students over 12 weekly one-hour sessions. The post covers the rationale for choosing Forth over Python or Scratch, curriculum design challenges, a hands-on stack teaching method using paper plates, and reflections on whether Forth was the right choice. The author concludes that the specific language matters less than providing immediate visual feedback and self-directed exploration, and closes with a broader argument for human-centered programming education in an era of increasing LLM reliance. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 62 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-07-27). **TL;DR:** The community is broadly intrigued by the idea of teaching Forth to kids, appreciating its simplicity and paradigm-expanding value, though many are skeptical it's the right choice for beginners given stack-manipulation complexity and the availability of more intuitive alternatives. **Sentiment:** 45% positive · 35% mixed · 20% skeptical **The case for** - Forth has extremely simple rules and a single data structure, making it good for teaching how computers actually work at a low level. - Leo Brodie's 'Starting Forth' is praised as an accessible, well-illustrated resource suitable for beginners. - The interactive REPL makes it easy to experiment and explore concepts like number bases and memory addresses. - Exposing kids to non-mainstream paradigms broadens their understanding of the field and different problem-solving approaches. - At least one commenter learned Forth as a child (age 6-7) and found it intuitive. **The pushback** - Stack manipulation words like DUP, OVER, ROT, and PICK are seen as a nightmare to teach to beginners. - Forth encourages global variables and its noise words make code hard to follow. - Python, Logo, or other languages may offer better interactivity and quicker gratification for kids. - The author's reasoning for choosing Forth over Python (finding Python 'incomprehensible') struck some as absurd. - One commenter argued it risks making kids hate programming by being unintuitive and impractical. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): HN commenters are split — some see Forth's simplicity as pedagogically valuable for teaching how computers work, while others argue it's a poor choice for beginners due to stack complexity and better alternatives like Logo or Python. - lobsters (positive): Lobsters commenters are generally enthusiastic about Forth as a paradigm-expanding experience, though they acknowledge it may not be the best teaching language for everyone. **Hottest debate:** Whether Forth's conceptual simplicity makes it a good teaching tool or whether its stack-manipulation idioms (DUP, ROT, SWAP) make it worse for beginners than mainstream languages like Python. **Open questions** - Would Logo (especially with a physical turtle) be a better choice for engaging kids in programming? - Is the goal to teach kids how computers work, or to teach them to program productively — and does Forth serve either goal better than alternatives? - How does RPL (as on HP calculators) compare to Forth as an educational tool? **Highlights** > From personal experience, I strongly disagree with the negative comments saying Forth isn't suitable for teaching children. "Starting Forth" by Leo Brodie was the first programming book I ever read when I was about 6 or 7 years old, after my dad brought it home from work (where they used Forth). To me, the language felt very intuitive and easy to grasp. And Brodie's illustrations helped a lot with visualizing how it all worked. > — [6581 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066863) > Yeah Forth doesn't seem very good as a teaching language. Maybe the "first lesson" part where you're just showing how you can build a toy program from simple words would go well, but any nontrivial project where you have to start incorporating DUP and OVER and ROT and PICK and friends seems like a nightmare to teach to anyone who hasn't programmed before. > — [ndiddy on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49064438) > > I wanted to avoid teaching syntax. While Python makes sense as pseudocode [...] it is still nearly incomprehensible to new learners [...] I decided I wanted to either teach Forth or Haskell. Sorry but this reads like a joke. If you find python incomprehensible, Forth and Haskell won't even register as languages. > — [sieste on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49065458) > 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. > — [ghoti on lobsters · 3 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/n3dz7x/teaching_kids_forth#c_egldi7) > 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. > — [benj111 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067089) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062700) · 39 points · 54 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/n3dz7x/teaching_kids_forth) · 19 points · 8 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years](https://daily.dev/posts/teach-yourself-programming-in-ten-years-lehjvh5ok) · Hacker News · 2 upvotes · 2 comments - [A Forth-inspired language for writing websites](https://daily.dev/posts/a-forth-inspired-language-for-writing-websites-3iwed2hie) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Programming Languages Are Authoring Tools for Platforms](https://daily.dev/posts/programming-languages-are-authoring-tools-for-platforms-kpxjlqhjz) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#webassembly](https://daily.dev/tags/webassembly) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/teaching-kids-forth-q4ty1fckn) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Teaching Kids Forth","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/teaching-kids-forth-q4ty1fckn","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/teaching-kids-forth-q4ty1fckn"},"datePublished":"2026-07-27T00:40:27.454Z","dateModified":"2026-07-27T14:12:03.108Z","description":"A developer shares their experience teaching Forth to middle and high school students over 12 weekly one-hour sessions. 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