RedHanded

Thankyou for enjoying The RedHanded Adventure Show. We have had the nth batmans galore!! I adore you. I will never forget you. I will especially not forget you if you follow me to Hackety Org.

Is this the first time a Ruby blog has closed?? No matter. There will three more by supper. I will enjoy those blogs as a plainclothes civilian. Tallyho.

I’m not sure if there’s any fixing the arcane parse errors of Ruby, but here’s a stab at it. I need to do some examination of other IDEs to see what else is being done to fix this.

Anyway, some screen captures from H-ety H 0.4.

This release has a lot of fixes to the bundled Try Ruby. (Problems with the cursor, browser crashes, tutorial loading time.) But the main feature is the new friendly and condensed error messages.

These same error messages are expanded into HTML in the program editor:

The next release will work on highlighting the line which threw the error and some links in the exception to help pages for any involved classes or error messages.

Here’s another nice feature. The bundled Try Ruby has a progress bar for page fetching. I want this console to be irresistible to you lot!!

aparrish: How can you find fault in a programming tutorial that teaches you how to make a blog before it teaches you how to do arithmetic?

AtDuskGreg: So many people drone on boringly about how important it is for kids to learn computers, only to come up with curricula that focus on using a spreadsheet or writing a resume.

Paul Robinson: The first book I ever read on programming was on BBC Basic and was illustrated with pictures of robots in factories pretending to be FOR loops.

I have a solid four years of work ahead of me on Hackety Hack, which is in my mind a very primitive tool, but hey the discussion is igniting. And among people who I haven’t encountered before, yeahhh!! One common theme is: where do you start teaching someone? (Brian D. pointed out Constructivism on the HH mailing list.)

I’m not really sure, actually. Who really knows if H-ety H goes about things in a sensible way. I was a very bad student myself and am often occupied with ideas which are widely acknowledged as ill-conceived. So, today, I’m surprised at the feelings of goodwill pouring in for Hackety Hack, but I suspect waves of criticism are forthcoming, which will be quite stimulating indeed.

I designed HH with two of my very good friends in mind, Oliver Mooradian and A. Woolsey. The second friend, A., was taking a university beginning Java class. The culminating exercise of his class was to read a comma-separated address book into memory. His program was nearly one-hundred lines long. And he wrote it knowing that he would never use it again. As a reminder: it is the year 2007.

I didn’t think I had many strong opinions about the way things should be. But this infuriated me!! This is not programming!! It should not be acceptable in 2007 for students to write a program which isn’t somehow useful to them. Not when we all use computers and are already employing micro-hacks (emoticons, bbcode, email addresses, etc.) everyday.

A. was also subject to a lot of mathematical programs: drawing circles, computing distances, a lot of spreadsheet-style activity. This sounds like academic drilling. Surely this can wait until after you’ve tinkered with RSS feeds and written a blog.

I can’t say, though. I personally only really use math for pagination and pointer arithmetic. Tell me: are math and programming intertwined much these days??

A few other H-ety H items you may be interested to hear of:

Over the last two months, I have met a small group of friends online who helped me out with a new program. The fifty people in that group have made my life soooo wonderful!!

Brian DeLacey, who started teaching 3 of his kids to program and kept detailed notes on their good and bad times.

Leslie Wu, who has been all over FFSandbox and Hpricot. I am amazed by how she can look in any direction and then do exactly what she wants in that direction. I repeat: she’s been hacking the sandbox for me!!

RSL, who’s been a regular around here, was one of the 50 and I really like his Hacky Mouse kaleidoscope.

Harold Hausman, who started LittleCoder and hung out in the group to offer encouragement and ideas—we’re going to team up soon, Harold!

And I still gotta dig up some links for the rest of these folks. (Eli?)

It’s so rare to find video of talks in English by our friends from Nihon Ruby-no Kai, but here is a lightning talk by Masayoshi Takahashi at last weekend’s OSDC in Taiwan. In case you haven’t had the pleasure. (Spotted on matz’ blog.)

Mark Pilgrim: The UNSELECTABLE attribute is implemented as an expando. Setting the expando property of the document object to false precludes the functionality of all expandos.

Kxxxx, oh when the jargon on MSDN hits stride and blossoms into complete psychedelia.

Someone please assemble a Wikipedia page for this rare bird. I want creators’ bios. I want the original legal pads. I want pronunciation mp3s. GO!!

From John Joyce in [ruby-talk:245343]:

I’m a little surprised at this. In irb, I tried puts gets gets. Why? I don’t know. But basically, gets gets, seems to almost act like a heredoc!

Such a simple and unintended thing: the double-gets. Do you see how it works?

Whoa, the rubini.us site is all fleshed out with forums and a wiki and the like.

What is Dev’il? The excellent Beast forum extended with tickets, pages, and source code changes.

What a fantastic little spook. Here’s Brian’s list of upcoming features.

In an article posted entitled What’s Wrong With Ruby?, the author cites me as one of the main problems:

If I was put off Ruby by the hype, I was put off more by the many cutesy introductory tutorials I encountered when trying to get into it. Why’s (Poignant) Guide is a particular horrid example… I don’t want someone chatting away to me and telling me how “cool” it all is (I’ve lived long enough as a computer programmer to know it’ll never really be “cool” to be one). I just want the straight facts, plainly put.

These are such great points and so well-put. See, actually, I’ve known since birth that I’m a problem, so this is no surprise to me. As a child, I caused a giant meadow fire that all the dads had to go fix! Also, I broke a statue! And now I’ve ruined Ruby. Uh. Oh.

If I may build on his argument for just a sec.

The problem here is: the author of the article is trying to do academics, to gain knowledge, to build a career. And my cartoons and stories have patronized him, belittled him, by treating him as if he wasn’t a real professional. This is a terrible breach of conduct. He has accolades innumerable. He has done no small deed. His peers are all gathered around him, wishing him the best and swelling with nothing but respect and esteem for him. NOW WHAT IS THIS CARTOON BOOK DOING HERE??

Programming is for world commerce. It is like agriculture or fossil fuels. It is lot a like baling hay. I’ll give you an example: You wouldn’t write a cartoon book with a plot and running narrative just to show a guy how to bale hay! That would frustrate the guy! He would throw that book in the pig’s pen! He just wants to get straight to the nitty-gritty and, for once in his life, just bale hay, straightway!

Fortunately, as I’ve mentioned before, I have a strong feeling that I will die young without artifact. That I will make no lasting impression. This will be my avenue. So hold your horses, I just have a few more things to do in life and I’m sure I’ll be out of your hair.

I know a lot of you have questions about how to use Hpricot. And I’d like to start helping with that a lot more. For example, did you know that XML files should be loaded with the Hpricot::XML() method? Oh, hey, that’s handy, right? That skips Hpricot’s HTML clean-up stuff.

So, I’ve started lists for both Hpricot and Sandbox, since both have had lots of good activity over the last little while.

To join:

For sandbox, the e-mail address is sandbox@code.whytheluckystiff.net. Please come along!