Hackety Hack

Hackety Hack is an open source application that teaches individuals how to create software. It combines an IDE with an extensive Lessons system. The cross-platform desktop application also has integration with the website, where "Hackers" can share what they've learned, ask questions, and submit feedback.

Hackety Hack is an open source application that teaches individuals how to create software. It combines an IDE with an extensive Lessons system. The cross-platform desktop application also has integration with the website, where "Hackers" can share what they've learned, ask questions, and submit feedback. === Post-Why development=== Why intended to release Hackety Hack 1.0 at the Art and Code Symposium. In his talk, he showed off a build that's known as "version 0.L," with promises of a 1.0 soon to follow. This never came to pass, as Why mysteriously disappeared in August 2009, deleting his projects. Because they were stored in git, the Ruby community was able to revive them. A small team kept working, releasing v0.9 on Christmas of 2009, and finally 1.0 on Christmas of 2010. ===Ruby Summer of Code 2010=== Hackety Hack was chosen as a project for the Ruby Summer of Code in 2010. Fela Winkelmolen was the student chosen to work on the project. Chris Redinger, Jeff Casimir, Sarah Mei, and Steve Klabnik mentored. === Blocks vs Ruby=== The difference of 'blocks vs. Ruby' stems from a shared belief: most programming languages require a lot of effort and knowledge before one can build more than the simplest of programs. The 'blocks' solution is to use the concepts of graphical programming so that beginners don't have to worry about syntactical or memorization issues, as there's a palette of blocks to choose from, and they only fit together in the correct way. The solution that Hackety Hack pursues is by teaching with a more traditional programming language, but adding libraries that make it easy to do complicated tasks in one line. For example, in a more traditional software library, making a background with a gradient would take five or six lines of code using a toolkit like Qt, but is one line in Hackety Hack. This is achieved by choosing simple defaults and dropping support for lesser-used options. ===Comparison with similar projects=== The university affiliation that Scratch and Alice enjoy gives them more resources to bring to bear. Both projects have teams of people, the brand credibility of their institutions, and graduate students to write papers about them and use them in research. Hackety Hack is a more nimble project, since the team is much smaller. It's also truly an open-source project, whereas the Alice project, for example, only releases dumps of the project source every so often. Hackety Hack's development is entirely open. ==References==

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