I really love the principle behind this: http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicam...

I hope that this can help make programming as fun and accessible as it was on the C64. I grew up learning QBasic, taking for granted that I could draw some stuff to the screen and play music in a handful lines of code.

For me, this is part of the magic of the Facebook platform. There would be "How do I..." posts on the platform forums, from people who clearly had no web development experience at all (and probably no programming experience in general). They made me realize that the Facebook platform, in its own way, captured some of the magic of writing a game in QBasic (or, before that, Z80/Commodore/whatever) and passing it along to your friends. All your friends use Facebook, none of you are hackers, but you make something neat on Facebook and they get to use it, and they know YOU made it... because of the intimacy, it's much more magical than just making a website or a desktop program.

Of course, it's a lot more complicated than it used to be. You can't just get a simple Basic program and start messing with it. You need to find hosting, with PHP, maybe MySQL, get the API client, figure out how to get it all working together, upload it... it's far from newbie friendly.

But still, I wouldn't be surprised if there are hundreds of kids today who first got into programming by asking the question "How do I make a Facebook app?"

I definitely agree with _why that we need more of this.

Speaking of beagles, and related to the little coder's predicament: It would be cool if someone chucked a beagle board (http://www.beagleboard.org) into a keyboard case and made a modern version of a C64. A hobby hacking community surrounding it based on _why's aesthetic would be a lot of fun.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of shoes. I tried an earlier version and found it just a bit lacking in features for things I wanted to do (networking, I think). Obviously this is the idea -- everybody wants a language that is nothing but exactly the features they want/need, but all of my sample application ideas were things that were going to need some kind of networking (network tic-tac-toe), and it didn't look like I could do what I wanted with it.

The last time I talked to a kid about computer programming, I asked what they'd want to write, and they said "a game", and drilling down I came to the conclusion that what they really wanted was a level editor for an otherwise complete game engine.

Obviously this is aimed at someone subtly different, but I think it this idea extended to have some graphics/network/game oriented gimmies would be really popular.

That doesn't make it a "level editor for [a] game engine", but it certainly should give you more than enough tools to build a networked tic-tac-toe game.

that's why... GUI objects that have intrinsic knowledge of networking are actually really powerful and useful.

It looks like Shoes is intended to be the graphics engine for writing Ruby apps including HH, and HH is supposed to be the easy-to-use general purpose programming language.

I would be curious to see how non-trivial applications fit within the Shoes framework. My experience with ambitious frameworks has been that they work great until you want to do something that isn't perfectly aligned with its intent/charter/design, then you start fighting them really fast. Maybe Ruby or Shoes offer ways around this, but if you have to write non-trivial network or disk i/o code maybe the total win you get from a really simple GUI framework is diminished.

True, once you break out into the "big bad world" of network protocols and disk I/O, your code may not be quite as dead simple, but it really shouldn't be too hard for most folks to jump from this:

  Shoes.app do
    button "PUSH!"
  end

  Shoes.app do
    stack do
      @text = para("hostnames go here...")
      button("PUSH!") { @text.replace(File.read("/etc/hosts")) }
    end
  end

  Shoes.setup do
    gem 'simple-rss'
  end
  
  require 'simple-rss'
  require 'open-uri'
  
  Shoes.app do
    stack do
      banner "News.YC Headlines"
  
      button("Fetch") do
        @articles.clear
        
        rss = SimpleRSS.parse(open("http://news.ycombinator.com/rss").read)
        
        rss.items.each do |item|
          @articles.append { para(item.title) }
        end
      end
      
      @articles = stack
    end
  end

it reads right to left (click on the left hand page of the spread to advance).

Brilliant zine-like design aesthetic.

Ironically, I haven't found the time to actually read it, but I page through it now and then just to admire the thing.

I made an attempt a few years ago at making a python library that would try to achieve the same sorts of things (more of just a wrapper around pygame, really), but never really had the motivation to keep running with it. With some extra ease-of-use wrapping around cocos2d, I think the goal would be met.

   >print MCMLXVII + 41
   2008