[REBOL] Re: The effect of learning Forth on my understanding of REBOL
From: carl:cybercraft at: 23-Mar-2007 18:00
On Thursday, 22-March-2007 at 13:23:26 Ged Byrne wrote,
>Are many REBOLers former FORTHers? Does anybody else think that Ian
>Brodies Thinking FORTH should be required reading (or better still,
>adapter into Thinking REBOLisouly)?
I learnt FORTH a decade or more before I encountered REBOL, and ditto for LOGO, both
of which are languages you extend by adding new words to. So I'm sure that helped me
to get to grips with REBOL, as did FORTH's reverse-Polish-notation and stack approach.
For some reason, I remember FORTH much better than I remember LOGO.
Encountering such different languages early in your programming life is a very good thing
I think, as apart from making you realize there's other approaches to language design,
it must be hard to switch from (say) just imperative languages after you've been using
them for many years.
REBOL does suffer from the same problem as FORTH and LOGO due to the 'adding new words'
ability though, in that code can be filled with words you won't find in the default dictionaries.
This can make the 'learn by examing some code' approach to getting to grips with a new
language difficult. I found learning by writing code to be the best approach.
-- Carl Read.
