The Great Geek Manual

Buzzword Compliant is calling Hackety Hack the “Harry Potter programming language.” What is Hackety Hack? Yeah, I didn’t know either.

It turns out that Hackety Hack is a Ruby-based environment, created as part of a manifesto entitled “The Little Coder’s Predicament” written in 2003 by a programmer known by the handle “why the lucky stiff” or just “why” for short. The language is a highly streamlined combination of conversational Ruby code and a no-brainer install environment. It’s purpose is to reawaken the interest in programming in younger generation that was rampant back in the eighties.

Why’s fundamental grievance is that, in the eighties, there were a pack of introductory programming languages that came ready-installed on most computers of the day. Either BASIC, LOGO, or PASCAL was there at your fingertips without any additional installations. He attmpts to compensate with a great set of simple tutorials available on Hackety Hack’s official site.

I think that it’s a brilliant project. I wish there were more out there like it. Public schools, at least in the United States, aren’t embracing the Information Age as they should be, and there are few enough places for adults to turn to teach themselves programming.

Here’s an example of Hackety:

blog = Table("MyBlog").recent(10)
Web.page {
  blog.each do |entry|
    title entry[:title]
    puts entry[:editbox]
  end
}