Hackety Hack for Learning Ruby Programming

This being CSEdWeek (Computer Science Education Week) the social media has been flooded with links to articles, information, great programs for promoting CS education, and other CS educational resources. One of the things I found this week was Hackety Hack. Hackety Hack is a programming environment, more or less an IDE, for learning the Ruby programming language. I’ve played with it a bit now and thought I should share it with others.

This is my first program. As you can see it uses Turtle graphics to draw a pentagon (so much more interesting than a square).

The IDE is pretty simple with only a small number of options. One of the options takes the user to a set of built-in lessons to get you started. In fact this sample is an extension of one of the lessons I tried.

Syntax is color coded which is very helpful. I miss the instruction completion that I am used to in things like Small Basic and Visual Studio but that is not a huge issue even though it would be helpful to have. There is a “cheat sheet” that has a lot of helpful language information though. I recommend that people take a look through that early on.

Hackety Hack lists itself at a 0.9 release so I suspect there is more development to be done. It is off to a promising start though.

I’m going to stick with it for a while as Ruby is one of those languages on my list of things to learn.

Along with a lot of other things of course. Running as fast as I can to keep up with this ever changing world of computer science.