Hackety Hack

Infobox Software
name = Hackety Hack
slogan = The Coder's Starter Kit



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developer = why the lucky stiff and 50 friends
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latest release version = 1.0
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operating system = Windows, Linux
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use = Easy Programming
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website = http://hacketyhack.net

Hackety Hack is a free Ruby-based environment aiming to make programming easily available to beginners, especially teenagers. Its driving force was an essay titled "The Little Coder's Predicament" written in 2003 by why the lucky stiff (AKA "_why"). It argued that programming isn't as readily available as it was in the Commodore 64 days, and that something should be done about it to help beginners tinker with their computers.

As "why" writes in [http://hacketyhack.net/manifesto/ Hackety Hack's manifesto] , the lack of any advancements in that area (even after great response to his essay) prompted him [http://redhanded.hobix.com/cult/theOriginalFifty.html and a small group of friends] to write their own take on how this effort to simplify the act of programming should be tackled. A seven lesson tutorial guides the newcomer through the basics, which involve simple activities like asking for a name and printing it out, and more complex ones like writing your own blogging engine and downloading files from the internet. Hackety Hack allows for seemingly difficult tasks to be performed with very few lines of readable code, which in turn give the newcomer a taste of how satisfying it is to build things.

Currently Hackety Hack version 0.4 is available for Windows and version 0.L for Linux, with Mac OS X version to follow.

As of 2008, Hackety Hack appears to be an abandoned project, with the last live page on the Wayback Machine dated August 29th, 2007. Why is promising to use Shoes to build a new Hackety Hack [http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/] .

External links

* [http://hacketyhack.net Official website]
* [http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicament.html The Little Coder's Predicament] , why's essay on the need for accessible programming tools for beginners
* [http://hacketyhack.net/manifesto/ Hackety Hack's manifesto]