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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I'll boil it down to one sentence: It's really hard to apply YAGNI and actually build an MVP.
I never quite understood YAGNI, because it seems illogical to always take that stance. Sometimes, you're gunna need it. Say YAGNI to everything, and you'll never create meaningful reusable abstractions. Other times, sure, you might be jumping into creating abstractions that don't turn out as useful as one would have hoped, but that's a decision which has to be made on a case-by-case basis.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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...).
I'm downloading it now, and I'm looking forward to checking it out later today if I get the chance.