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.

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