July 26, 2026
Stack attack: kids edition
Teaching Kids Forth – Anna Liberty
She taught kids an old-school coding language, and the internet instantly argued about it
TLDR: A teacher chose a rare 1970s coding language to help kids make art and learn core computer ideas in a web browser. Commenters were split between admiration, disbelief, and nostalgia, with some calling it a terrible choice for children and others insisting weird old tools can shape how young minds think.
A teacher set out to do something wildly unfashionable: introduce middle and high school students to programming through Forth, a little-known language from the 1970s, instead of the usual kid-friendly favorites like Python or Scratch. Her pitch was simple: skip some of the confusing punctuation and get students making art, animations, and games in a browser with no downloads. Noble? Absolutely. Quietly chaotic? Also absolutely.
The comments, however, turned this into a full-on "bold experiment or cursed choice?" showdown. The loudest reaction came from a self-described Forth superfan who basically said, I adore this thing and would still never unleash it on a room full of children. That set the mood fast. Others immediately jumped in with the classic internet challenge: "Why?" Suddenly the whole thread became less about the class and more about a philosophical custody battle over what beginner coding should even look like.
Then came the nostalgic defense squad. One commenter fondly remembered learning a similar stack-based calculator language as a teen and claimed it genuinely changed how they think. Another dragged in the beloved old book Starting Forth as proof that this oddball approach can be fun, influential, and maybe even secretly brilliant. And of course, someone asked the painfully practical question hanging over the entire discussion: why not just use Processing or p5.js, the art tools everyone expected? In other words, the teacher wanted to open doors; the comments wanted to inspect the hinges, roast the doorknob, and argue about whether there should have been a different door entirely.
Key Points
- •Anna Liberty chose Forth over more common teaching tools like Python and Scratch for a programming course aimed at middle and high school students.
- •She selected Forth after considering both Forth and Haskell, citing easier integration into a custom learning environment and the relative simplicity of procedural programming for a final demo.
- •The course was designed around 12 weekly one-hour sessions, with limited expectation of homework completion.
- •Students' main deliverable was to create art in the Forth environment, such as a drawing, animation, or game.
- •The original plan to build a browser-based Forth in Rust with WASM was abandoned due to bugs, and the course instead used Nick Morgan's Easy Forth.