Current mood:	jealous
Entry tags:	software_development

Hacking it for the kids

I remember reading The Little Coder's Predicament some years back. I agreed strongly with the essay: many of my generation were encouraged to code because our home computers et al, bought for games, made it so easy and rewarding to play and experiment. Machines are now much more powerful, and the Net makes the potential rewards far greater, but today's generation lacked such an immediately accessible path into programming.

The author of the article has since become something of a Ruby guru with a track record of turning dreams into code. Recently he's addressed his Predicament and with a little help from his friends brought Hackety Hack into being. It's in an early phase (Windows only, and not quite bug-free) but I think this will be a great playground.

When I was thirteen, my ZX Spectrum let me make beeps, plot pixels and clash colors. Its contemporary equivalent HH lets you work directly with the things that matter today: web pages, feeds, audio, images, video. It's a bit like Pipes without the annoying drag 'n' drop (or Yahoo ID.) The underpinnings are rather too indistinguishable from magic to trust with anything you'd get paid for, but what a great way this would be to write your first real-time networking web app:

chat = Hacker('anthony').channel('test')
Web.popup do
  title('Chat Client')
  box = scrollbox
  editline('Say')
  buttons('Send') { |popup| chat.say(popup['Say']) }
  every(1) { chat.hear.each { |message| add_to_scrollbox message } }
end

Hackety's hackers can share programs and data across the Net very easily - much better than getting the computer to squeal into a tape that you take round to your mate's house! I really hope that this thing will take off and get some people programming.