7 ms·

Why I Recommend Against Hackety Hack

46 points by AlSweigart 14y ago

sadlyNess 14y ago
Almost every item of 'suckery' listed is something that can be fixed or rather, finished. And it's OS.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  This is true, and I'd be willing to help anyone that wants to help me do it.
  - jetti 14y ago
    I'm not sure what kind of help you need but am sending you an email offering my services (if I can even provide any).
    - steveklabnik 14y ago
      Thanks, I just sent you one back.
frozenport 14y ago
Teaching kids Ruby? What happened to dreams? Do we want our kids engineering the next mobile dating platform for the enterprise? We should be teaching them OpenGL, C++, or maybe javascript.
- mahmud 14y ago
  OpenGL, C++ and Javascript? The winning ticket for the "brokenness" trifecta. I can't think of a combination in modern computing that would rot a mind quicker than these three. There are already languages and tools that combine simplicity, sophistication and conceptual elagance. Scheme, Scratch, Oz, and yes, Hackety Hack.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    I'm not understanding why you are praising Scheme and criticizing Javascript - the biggest differences between them seem syntactic.
    - AnthonBerg 14y ago
      Syntax is critically important when teaching the average beginner.
    - mahmud 14y ago
      You don't know Scheme if you think their differences are just syntactic. Hint: what about that whole prototype object sysytem? There is a running joke in PL research that "programming languages = lambda calculus + constants". Scheme IS λ + k. JavaScript is that plus the kitchen sink with the Ringling Brothers Circus caravan in tow.
- twelvechairs 14y ago
  Teach kids Ruby and if they are interested they will learn other languages later. Ruby (before you go on to rails) is very flexible in its use and good to branch from. C++, javascript, and opengl have very particular use cases, which is fine if you know thats you want to do, but pointless if you just want to learn generalised programming concepts... If you want to go lower-level better to learn some assembly (or at least C) instead...
  - AnthonBerg 14y ago
    Agreed on assembly. Some beginners take exceptionally well to the "purity" they perceive in assembly (given that it's a good assembly language for a well thought out processor - a processor that doesn't physically exist could even be the best one). Edit: Purity in the way that the crucial ideas are presented directly, and an intuitive understanding of primal computation can be gained directly.
  - shod 14y ago
    Might I suggest Python instead? It's more immediately useful to kids interested in the sciences.
    - AnthonBerg 14y ago
      Let's do both.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  You have to start simple with young children. Something has to happen relatively quickly to maintain engagement. Typing may not be fluid in most children still in single digit years. I suspect (but cannot prove) that if architectural ideas, and skills of 'debugging' and analysis are learned young, they will be able to learn more powerful languages and concepts later with less overhead. Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://scratch.mit.edu/) is getting a lot of attention from teachers in the UK. The government recently scrapped the existing IT curriculum in schools and wants more programming taught in schools. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-boring-it-lessons http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-... http://www.teachprimary.com/learning_resources/view/creating-a-new-ict-curriculum http://www.teachprimary.com/learning_resources/view/creating... OK, HNers, here is something to chew on... You have around 5 million children in schools between 5 and 11 years old. You have professional and well trained teachers but with variable skill sets, remember teachers teach everything to a single class in that age group. You have decent numbers of PCs/Laptops and some tablet use. The government wants all children to learn programming. What are you going to do?
  - sadlyNess 14y ago
    1. Make programming a compulsory subject in high/secondary schools. 2. Hope that some of those students become teachers after their tertiary education where programming is included. Now you have 8 year olds being competently taught how to program. 3. Realise that teaching every kid to program doesn't work. The nerds now do hardware. 4. Government decides that all kids should learn to tinker with arduino. My point is: not all kids needs to learn to program, only to know that it is something they might be interested in.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      I take your points, especially the one about hardware, but the government has decided that, indeed, programming of some kind will be taught in schools! The development timescale is next year or the year after, so these skills will be delivered by existing staff. My point is: teaching environments like Scratch, or Web sites with visually appealing interactive content related to programming will be in demand. Watch the social stuff though, we have a big safeguarding agenda in the UK.
steveklabnik 14y ago
Hackety Hack maintainer here! Two things: 1. As popular as Hackety Hack is/was, I have pretty much been the sole maintainer for the past few years. This is really, really hard. Like, "reverse engineer a website from the app's API" hard. "Spend 6 months trying to get it to compile" hard. "Deal with thousands of lines of uncommented C written by someone who specifically enjoyed obscurity" hard. 2. Technical debt due to Shoes (the GUI toolkit Hackety is built on top of, see above comments about difficulty) has led to a few people re-writing Shoes from scratch[1]. It is relatively active. Hackety development is on a moratorium until that work is done. 3. I volunteer with CodeNow[2], and we teach using Hackety to high school kids. They generally find it to be pretty awesome. It is no secret that Hackety is not as active as I'd like it to be. Getting help is hard. I've asked for it a few times, and nobody (relatively speaking) wants to, so here we are. I will help anyone help me in any way they can. 1: https://github.com/shoes/shoes4 https://github.com/shoes/shoes4 2: http://codenow.org/ http://codenow.org/
- AlSweigart 14y ago
  Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. I have to ask, wouldn't it have just been a lot easier to start from scratch with Shoes, but also start over with Hackety Hack? I'm not familiar with the implementation of Shoes, but couldn't you write a wrapper for an existing GUI toolkit that just had a simplified API? Or, since so much of Hackety Hack's GUI looks and acts like a web page, just implement Hackety Hack as an offline web app, where the typed Ruby code is just piped to the interpreter running on the box, and the results are returned as HTML displayed in the browser? It seems like a lot of work is reinventing basic things (text editor, GUI toolkits, etc.)
  - wakaflaka 14y ago
    Sounds like you got it figured out. Why don't you take care of it for him?
    - roopeshv 14y ago
      coz he's writing many more books related to programming for beginners, unlike you who's just got snarkiness and nothing else going for him/her
zachgalant 14y ago
For a beginner, you need to check out www.codehs.com -- we've made it really easy to get started and a ton of fun to learn. Plus, students all get access to and personalized help from tutors whenever they ask a question or submit their code.
- harryf 14y ago
  CodeHS looks pretty good; logo-esque from first glance. I see a problem though... As a parent having tried everything I can find (logo, scratch, hackety hack, invent with python, straight PHP programming etc. etc.) to teach my kids (currently 9 & 6) programming, the #1 problem is the medium is wrong: sitting still in front of a computer for more than 15 minutes is diametrically opposed to their natural behaviour. The best approach I've found, which also makes a great party game is "How to train your robot" -> http://drtechniko.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/ http://drtechniko.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/ . It works well because there are no computers involved. Cargobot on the iPad also works pretty well, although largely because it's an iPad Also recently had success with http://popapp.in http://popapp.in plus UI stencils although this is more design / hypermedia than programming
evolve2k 14y ago
My son was 8 when I got him into HacketyHack, he loved it and made many little desktop apps using HH and it's shoes interface. His favorite apps where ones where the user was asked questions and things happened depending on what the user said. He loved showing friends and relatives. HH had been abandoned since before _why disappeared. I have to acknowledge Steve and his happy band for recovering the project and getting it to a version 1.0 I don't know the full back story but shoes on which HH is based had many issues as a code base, also HH was originally designed so it would run on PC/Mac/Linux. As a cross platform desktop software the project is in need of more badass devs who are not afraid to do local Dev work on different os's. My son has learnt a lot of code since he stared with HH and we found he then easily transitioned to Sublime plus shoes but if there were some more HH modules (and greater windows stability), I know even today he'd be keen to jump on there.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Glad to hear it. Thanks. :) I've heard of a few 7 or 8 year olds going through it, I'm glad I managed to make it accessible for them too (even with a little help, I'm sure.)
ryguytilidie 14y ago
Spent last year learning to code. I had the same problem with Hackity Hack, it really didn't teach me anything. It was a huge handholding operation. I did Team Treehouse last month and it was infinitely better. This is no criticism of Steve, who is clearly working hard, but just a realistic view of what tools you should consider if you want to learn to program.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Thanks! I actually consider 'a huge handholding operation' to be a big compliment: that's the point of a tool like this. You obviously didn't need handholding, but many do: they're my market. I'm glad Treehouse was able to help you. Keep building cool stuff!
cloudhead 14y ago
This shameless post alongside its comments is the reason I and others have left OSS.
aneth4 14y ago
Watch _why talk about Hackety Hack. http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/_why-aa-jonathan-gillette/ http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/_why-aa-jonathan-g...

46 points by AlSweigart 14y ago

sadlyNess 14y ago

Almost every item of 'suckery' listed is something that can be fixed or rather, finished. And it's OS.

steveklabnik 14y ago
This is true, and I'd be willing to help anyone that wants to help me do it.
- jetti 14y ago
  I'm not sure what kind of help you need but am sending you an email offering my services (if I can even provide any).
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    Thanks, I just sent you one back.

frozenport 14y ago

Teaching kids Ruby? What happened to dreams? Do we want our kids engineering the next mobile dating platform for the enterprise? We should be teaching them OpenGL, C++, or maybe javascript.

mahmud 14y ago
OpenGL, C++ and Javascript? The winning ticket for the "brokenness" trifecta. I can't think of a combination in modern computing that would rot a mind quicker than these three. There are already languages and tools that combine simplicity, sophistication and conceptual elagance. Scheme, Scratch, Oz, and yes, Hackety Hack.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  I'm not understanding why you are praising Scheme and criticizing Javascript - the biggest differences between them seem syntactic.
  - AnthonBerg 14y ago
    Syntax is critically important when teaching the average beginner.
  - mahmud 14y ago
    You don't know Scheme if you think their differences are just syntactic. Hint: what about that whole prototype object sysytem? There is a running joke in PL research that "programming languages = lambda calculus + constants". Scheme IS λ + k. JavaScript is that plus the kitchen sink with the Ringling Brothers Circus caravan in tow.
twelvechairs 14y ago
Teach kids Ruby and if they are interested they will learn other languages later. Ruby (before you go on to rails) is very flexible in its use and good to branch from. C++, javascript, and opengl have very particular use cases, which is fine if you know thats you want to do, but pointless if you just want to learn generalised programming concepts... If you want to go lower-level better to learn some assembly (or at least C) instead...
- AnthonBerg 14y ago
  Agreed on assembly. Some beginners take exceptionally well to the "purity" they perceive in assembly (given that it's a good assembly language for a well thought out processor - a processor that doesn't physically exist could even be the best one). Edit: Purity in the way that the crucial ideas are presented directly, and an intuitive understanding of primal computation can be gained directly.
- shod 14y ago
  Might I suggest Python instead? It's more immediately useful to kids interested in the sciences.
  - AnthonBerg 14y ago
    Let's do both.
keithpeter 14y ago
You have to start simple with young children. Something has to happen relatively quickly to maintain engagement. Typing may not be fluid in most children still in single digit years. I suspect (but cannot prove) that if architectural ideas, and skills of 'debugging' and analysis are learned young, they will be able to learn more powerful languages and concepts later with less overhead. Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://scratch.mit.edu/) is getting a lot of attention from teachers in the UK. The government recently scrapped the existing IT curriculum in schools and wants more programming taught in schools. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-boring-it-lessons http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-... http://www.teachprimary.com/learning_resources/view/creating-a-new-ict-curriculum http://www.teachprimary.com/learning_resources/view/creating... OK, HNers, here is something to chew on... You have around 5 million children in schools between 5 and 11 years old. You have professional and well trained teachers but with variable skill sets, remember teachers teach everything to a single class in that age group. You have decent numbers of PCs/Laptops and some tablet use. The government wants all children to learn programming. What are you going to do?
- sadlyNess 14y ago
  1. Make programming a compulsory subject in high/secondary schools. 2. Hope that some of those students become teachers after their tertiary education where programming is included. Now you have 8 year olds being competently taught how to program. 3. Realise that teaching every kid to program doesn't work. The nerds now do hardware. 4. Government decides that all kids should learn to tinker with arduino. My point is: not all kids needs to learn to program, only to know that it is something they might be interested in.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    I take your points, especially the one about hardware, but the government has decided that, indeed, programming of some kind will be taught in schools! The development timescale is next year or the year after, so these skills will be delivered by existing staff. My point is: teaching environments like Scratch, or Web sites with visually appealing interactive content related to programming will be in demand. Watch the social stuff though, we have a big safeguarding agenda in the UK.

steveklabnik 14y ago

Hackety Hack maintainer here! Two things: 1. As popular as Hackety Hack is/was, I have pretty much been the sole maintainer for the past few years. This is really, really hard. Like, "reverse engineer a website from the app's API" hard. "Spend 6 months trying to get it to compile" hard. "Deal with thousands of lines of uncommented C written by someone who specifically enjoyed obscurity" hard. 2. Technical debt due to Shoes (the GUI toolkit Hackety is built on top of, see above comments about difficulty) has led to a few people re-writing Shoes from scratch[1]. It is relatively active. Hackety development is on a moratorium until that work is done. 3. I volunteer with CodeNow[2], and we teach using Hackety to high school kids. They generally find it to be pretty awesome. It is no secret that Hackety is not as active as I'd like it to be. Getting help is hard. I've asked for it a few times, and nobody (relatively speaking) wants to, so here we are. I will help anyone help me in any way they can. 1: https://github.com/shoes/shoes4 https://github.com/shoes/shoes4 2: http://codenow.org/ http://codenow.org/

AlSweigart 14y ago
Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. I have to ask, wouldn't it have just been a lot easier to start from scratch with Shoes, but also start over with Hackety Hack? I'm not familiar with the implementation of Shoes, but couldn't you write a wrapper for an existing GUI toolkit that just had a simplified API? Or, since so much of Hackety Hack's GUI looks and acts like a web page, just implement Hackety Hack as an offline web app, where the typed Ruby code is just piped to the interpreter running on the box, and the results are returned as HTML displayed in the browser? It seems like a lot of work is reinventing basic things (text editor, GUI toolkits, etc.)
- wakaflaka 14y ago
  Sounds like you got it figured out. Why don't you take care of it for him?
  - roopeshv 14y ago
    coz he's writing many more books related to programming for beginners, unlike you who's just got snarkiness and nothing else going for him/her

zachgalant 14y ago

For a beginner, you need to check out www.codehs.com -- we've made it really easy to get started and a ton of fun to learn. Plus, students all get access to and personalized help from tutors whenever they ask a question or submit their code.

harryf 14y ago
CodeHS looks pretty good; logo-esque from first glance. I see a problem though... As a parent having tried everything I can find (logo, scratch, hackety hack, invent with python, straight PHP programming etc. etc.) to teach my kids (currently 9 & 6) programming, the #1 problem is the medium is wrong: sitting still in front of a computer for more than 15 minutes is diametrically opposed to their natural behaviour. The best approach I've found, which also makes a great party game is "How to train your robot" -> http://drtechniko.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/ http://drtechniko.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/ . It works well because there are no computers involved. Cargobot on the iPad also works pretty well, although largely because it's an iPad Also recently had success with http://popapp.in http://popapp.in plus UI stencils although this is more design / hypermedia than programming

evolve2k 14y ago

My son was 8 when I got him into HacketyHack, he loved it and made many little desktop apps using HH and it's shoes interface. His favorite apps where ones where the user was asked questions and things happened depending on what the user said. He loved showing friends and relatives. HH had been abandoned since before _why disappeared. I have to acknowledge Steve and his happy band for recovering the project and getting it to a version 1.0 I don't know the full back story but shoes on which HH is based had many issues as a code base, also HH was originally designed so it would run on PC/Mac/Linux. As a cross platform desktop software the project is in need of more badass devs who are not afraid to do local Dev work on different os's. My son has learnt a lot of code since he stared with HH and we found he then easily transitioned to Sublime plus shoes but if there were some more HH modules (and greater windows stability), I know even today he'd be keen to jump on there.

steveklabnik 14y ago
Glad to hear it. Thanks. :) I've heard of a few 7 or 8 year olds going through it, I'm glad I managed to make it accessible for them too (even with a little help, I'm sure.)

ryguytilidie 14y ago

Spent last year learning to code. I had the same problem with Hackity Hack, it really didn't teach me anything. It was a huge handholding operation. I did Team Treehouse last month and it was infinitely better. This is no criticism of Steve, who is clearly working hard, but just a realistic view of what tools you should consider if you want to learn to program.

steveklabnik 14y ago
Thanks! I actually consider 'a huge handholding operation' to be a big compliment: that's the point of a tool like this. You obviously didn't need handholding, but many do: they're my market. I'm glad Treehouse was able to help you. Keep building cool stuff!

cloudhead 14y ago

This shameless post alongside its comments is the reason I and others have left OSS.

aneth4 14y ago

Watch _why talk about Hackety Hack. http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/_why-aa-jonathan-gillette/ http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/_why-aa-jonathan-g...