Hackety Hack is a free Ruby-based environment aiming to make programming easily available to beginners, particularly teenagers. Its driving force was an essay titled The Little Coder's Predicament written in 2003 by why the lucky stiff (AKA why). It argued that programming isn't as readily available as it was in the Commodore 64 days, and that something should be done about it to help beginners tinker with their computers.

As why writes in Hackety Hack's manifesto, the lack of any advancements in that area (even after great response to his essay) prompted him and a small group of friends to write their own take on how this effort to simplify the act of programming should be tackled. A seven lesson tutorial guides the newcomer through the basics, which involve simple activities like asking for a name and printing it out, and more complex ones like writing your own blogging engine and downloading files from the internet. Hackety Hack allows for seemingly difficult tasks to be performed with very few lines of readable code, which in turn give the newcomer a taste of how satisfying it is to build things.

Currently Hackety Hack version 0.5.1 is available for Windows (Windows XP or Vista suggestested on site) and version 0.L for Linux with Mac OS X version to follow.