The ghost of _why returns to teach people programming & Ruby | Hacker News Reader

The ghost of _why returns to teach people programming & Ruby

hackety-hack.com

79 pointsyarapavan20 comments

Effectively a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2038976.

This is a problem that even DupeDetector couldn't have caught. Hm.

I just finished all of the lessons. Great stuff.

I'd like to find out more about how to contribute, whether content, marketing, etc. I think it's spot on for simple step by step "learn by doing" approach to beginner programming.

I think there are a lot of possibilities...

Hey vnchr, thanks!

Can you send me an email, and we'll talk about it? Its' in my profile.

Haha, I'm not a ghost, but if I can be half the coder _why was, I'll be happy.

_whynot

This reminds me of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

How so?

Wye. ("Wye not?")

I haven't tried hackety-hack yet. But my initial assessment tells me that stuff like these are very good for people who want to learn new stuff. Is there something like this for Python?

Hackety-hack is a wonderful piece of software for teaching programming. Take it from me, it's how I learned a lot of beginning knowledge.

There isn't anything directly similar for Python, but eventually, Hackety will be language-agnostic. This is probably a loooong time off, though. And by probably, I mean "is."

Check out http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ if you want to learn Python from the beginning.

My sister has little programming experience but wants to learn to make webapps. Should I send her this or point her to some javascript stuff?

It depends. Two thoughts:

1: programming is programming. I'm trying to keep it about programming in general, not just Ruby specifically. You can read the lessons here[1], they're written in a simple DSL.

2: Webapps have both a server side and a client side component. I doubt that she'll be starting off with Node.js, eh? It could be because I'm a back-end kinda guy, but I'd rather start with simple, more old-school apps before getting into javascript heavy AJAXy client-side ones. YMMV.

1: https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/tree/master/lesso...

Aww... you got my hopes up for _why's return and you reminded me how much I missed his contributions to the ruby community.

If you're out there somewhere _why, please come back. We miss you.

Didn't work on ubuntu. ;(

/tmp/selfgz13504/hacketyhack-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libssh2.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Been fighting with it all day. I want to have .deb and .rpms eventually, but for now build your own Shoes seems to be the best way for Linux:

https://github.com/shoes/shoes/wiki/Building-Shoes-on-Linux

https://github.com/downloads/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/hackety...

Yes, this is a non-answer for now. But better than nothing. :/

No problem, thanks for the links..

It says, "Shoes has to be built with Ruby 1.9.1." Is that strict, or will 1.9.2 work? Edit: Actually, I'll tell you in a minute.

Update: This is a bit beyond what I was expecting. What do I do with the .shy file after shoes is installed?

Mind shooting me an email? This thread will just get lost in my HN replies... 1.9.2 should build it properly.

try "sudo apt-get install libssh2-1"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com