I felt like I had to change ‘notorious’ to ‘prodigious’, so I did. A prodigious Ruby programmer, indeed.

I felt the 50 friends part was important. :)

Have you ever looked at the DrScheme environment? Any thoughts? This is what my college uses in its freshman programming course but is targeted towards younger kidlings as well. I don’t particularly like it but it seems to share similar goals to HH. It comes with a ‘toy’ version of Scheme geared towards beginning programmers, for example.

I love it. _why, your place in Heaven is secure. Further good deeds would be redundant. I suggest you spend the next few years telling fibs to nuns and stealing from the homeless, just to balance things out a bit.

One nit: Perhaps HH should not link to your home page, which, while not directly harmful to kids, might harm them indirectly when uptight parents send HH to the wastebasket.

I’ll be the first to agree with Mr. bguthrie. When I read the previous post concerning HH, my mind directly shifted to DrScheme. It was my christening boat into the world of programming, and a better guide I could not have asked for.

My view is that introductions to programming should never focus on syntax, IDEs and compilers: you don’t care about that while learning. If anything, it makes things seem more complex than they really are.

Now thanks to your deeds, along with your friendly mob, the new kids on the block will be able to learn programming in a language that may actually be more versatile than Scheme.

A small revision to the Pragmatic Guide may be at hand, ne?

agree with jeem. perhaps myspace.com/_hackety_hack. the 13+ kids will think you’re not only smart but cool. and to think of the automatic song playing possibilities…

When I first saw the HacketyHack page, I thought it was poking fun at the Ruby community. Later, when I realized that it was real, I was completely blown away.

Awesome.

Well done, _why.

Thank you, _why! I’ve been teaching Ruby to my 8 year old daughter, and she can write simple console-based programs, but it’s a pretty big leap from there to GUI (Ruby-GTK or the like) or web-based (Camping or Rails). I’m eagerly looking forward to going through HH with my daughter (once a Linux version exists—she has Linux installed and I tried HH in Wine but it fails). It looks like a great tool and just what I was looking for.

I had considered Squeak, but it just didn’t feel like programming (same for Logo). I want something that actually teaches my daughter real programming, not just learning how to use a specific programming tool. For example, she learned to hand-code her own web site from scratch rather than using NVu, Dreamweaver or (god forbid) Frontpage, because i think the hand-holding actually stunts learning. Understanding the building blocks is important. HH seems to do that by teaching actual Ruby rather than providing too many crutches.

Sorry for rambling. We’ll be sure to contribute any simple HH programs she writes to the public code, for other kids.

Thanks again!

Scratch is interesting as well, but it’s not ruby.

There’s a lot that I have borrowed and am planning to borrow from Scratch. It’s a tremendously noble effort really.

I’ve been less inspired by DrScheme. It feels like it’s pandering to the IDE enthusiasts. Since I don’t like the direction IDEs have gone, I’ve never been able to welcome DrScheme onto my hard drive for long.

There’s actually a wealth of good stuff happening across the world, it just all needs to be amplified and to become more competitive. I think the biggest thing teaching tools today need are: artistic style, personality and a festering, lethal dose of pure excitement.

Neat stuff _why. So you guys had to grok XUL for this?

I never knew I had a blog. I was going to protest, but since it’s been cached on Google, we’ll leave this in the hands of fate.

For the special occasion, Vitaly helped me take a unique emo-Eli photograph. The deep creases in my forehead probably represent my thinking about heavy and painful subjects, while I suppose my other hand is furiously blogging away.