Have you read The Little Coder’s Predicament?  Similar articles have been published, and rambling on the positive and negative side has occurred here, but I must say that I side with _why on this issue : hacking is just not accessible to children and non-geeks like it used to be.

The solution?  Many have been proposed, including one that was named after _why’s article (LittleCoder).  Now, _why and friends are pushing forward a whyware project to end the issue forever : Hackey Hack.  The program (Windows-only for now, but that will change) gives simple kid-and-non-geek-friendly lessons on the Ruby programming language, while simultaneously allowing users to experiment (a.k.a. hack) to their heart’s content.

_why, whoever he may be, has also switched his blogging venue and topic.  He is now running hackety.org as a blog about hacking and code as art in general.

This is a really exciting project, and one I hope to make use of and see used in a big way!