

Merry Christmas, HN. Hackety Hack 1.0 is here. - steveklabnik
http://blog.hackety-hack.com/post/2457961910/merry-christmas-and-a-1-0-announcement

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jordanmessina
Congrats, Steve. I know you've been working really hard on this lately. I'm
lucky enough to know Steve personally, and I can say it would be hard for
anyone to find another person as dedicated to a project as him.

Happy Holidays buddy!

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code_duck
Finally, some programming tutorials I can understand! I'm only sort of joking.
Actually I'd love to see something like this for languages I find tough to
understand, such as Haskell (I know there are some resources out there...).

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Bud
Hackety Hack! (Don't talk back.)

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Groxx
Giving it a try right now, and first thoughts:

1) icons on the left are too small, they don't match the overall size of other
things in the system (they're smaller than text, for instance). Also makes it
harder to identify them, especially with the rainbow background.

2) "Menu" button on mouse-over says "index", and while in the index it
_really_ needs a "back" button to go back to where you were. I hit the "x",
and closed the entire tutorial - maybe that should be the back button?

3) Crashed it after the first example, and now it crashes on launch (ouch).
Crash report after the launch-death: <http://pastebin.com/inSUPesY> next
launch worked, couldn't find where it stored its preferences to clear them, so
that's good... I can post my console logs if you like.

All in all though, looks pretty good! I'll probably try it on a couple non-
programmers, and see what they think. If you see this, do you have a preferred
mode of contact for that info?

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samdk
Thanks for all of the work you've put into this, Steve! It's been really nice
to see someone as dedicated as you are working on Hackety Hack.

I'm downloading it now, and I'm looking forward to checking it out later today
if I get the chance.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks! Please let me know what you think once you've played with it for a
bit.

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alanh
Sounds like a great project.

I do wonder why I can’t find any “about” page or reference to _why, whose work
was so clearly inspirational, at least?

~~~
steveklabnik
There's no about page because I totally re-did everything on the site in the
last two days, and I'm missing some stuff. See the "MVP" comment below... he's
still #1 in the README.

Secondly... _why is gone. He's dearly missed... but he left. He wants to be
left alone. I don't think that saying "_why _why _why" all the time is going
to help repair the whole he left in our collective hearts.

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goodtobe
This looks really cool, but there seems to be a problem with character sets.
All of the text within the program consists of '◻', even on the welcome screen
and within the editor. This occurs on 10.6.4. Hopefully I haven't missed
something obvious. EDIT: I managed to run a program, and the text in the
dialog windows looks fine.

~~~
steveklabnik
Hm, this is odd. I'm also on 10.6.4... and I include the fonts inside, so that
shouldn't be a problem... Hrm.

EDIT: Are you using US default stuff? There's a known issue involving foreign
keyboard settings... I wonder if it's similar.

~~~
ugh
Maybe I can shed some light on this. I accidentally launched Hackety Hack
inside the Disk Image and no characters showed up. The copy on my harddrive
runs without a problem. I just tried again and it seems like the bug is
reproducible. It seems like the easiest solution would be to just zip Hackety
Hack instead of using .dmg ;-) (OS X 10.6.5)

~~~
steveklabnik
Iiiiinteresting. Thanks for the heads up, I'll file an Issue and check it out.

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cjbprime
Hi, I tried to post this to the "Ask a question" form but got an internal
server error in response. I was going to say:

Hey, any sign of a Linux version of 1.0? If some porting work needs to be
done, could you describe it? I'd be willing to help. Thanks!

\-- cjb.

~~~
steveklabnik
Hmmm. Oh, you know what. Were you logged in? I think the code might have some
problems with anonymous entries, I'll look it over tonight.

There isn't a single package Linux version, but you can make a Shoes on Linux
and then run the .shy file. We'd love to have some help with a Linux port,
though... send me an email, and we'll talk about it. That'd be awesome.

~~~
cjbprime
No, wasn't logged in.

I thought I'd start out by just getting it running, but I'm pretty stuck at a
Shoes window with "undefined method `font' for (Object):Object".

~~~
steveklabnik
Hm. Strange. How'd you get your Shoes? Did you compile it?

~~~
cjbprime
No, grabbed the latest Ubuntu package. I'll try compiling now.

~~~
steveklabnik
Oh, my. That is about two years old. Team Shoes has started poking at the
Debian beaurocracy to get that fixed, but it'll take a while.

Please send me an email if you have Shoes problems. I've been trying to
improve those docs...

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steveklabnik
Hey everyone-

I actually have a fair amount to say about this release, but I've been burning
the candle at both ends for the last few weeks putting this together, so
that'll be a post for another day. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. As
always, feedback is really appreciated.

I'll boil it down to one sentence: It's really hard to apply YAGNI and
actually build an MVP. Here it is.

~~~
jdp23
Congrats, Steve!

Would HacketyHack be good for a smart 10-year-old who's new to programming?

~~~
steveklabnik
I started with BASIC when I was 7, so I'd say yes, absolutely. The four
lessons walk you through a tour of what Hackety can do, the concepts of
programming via LOGO, basic programming in Ruby, and then simple things with
Shoes. I've got a bunch of examples, too... you can check them out on GitHub
directly, and see how you feel about them:

Lessons:
[https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/tree/master/lesso...](https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/tree/master/lessons)

Samples:
[https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/tree/master/sampl...](https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/tree/master/samples)

The biggest thing is that it's just Ruby, with a bunch of libraries. I still
need to come up with a good solution for STDIN and STDOUT, but it's all just
Ruby 1.9.1.

~~~
rick_2047
It's nice that you have a very easy API to make lessons, maybe someone can
port _why's poignant guide to ruby as a Interactive Fiction to hackety hack.

Q: is there a way to add pictures?

~~~
steveklabnik
Yep, I include a picture of Matz in the Ruby one:
[https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/blob/master/lesso...](https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/blob/master/lessons/basic_ruby.rb#L51)

You can also just use a URL from the web, and the first time the program runs,
it downloads and caches it.

