Hackety Hack was originally created by _why in order to solve "The Little Coder's Predicament":[1] that learning modern software development is complicated, and difficult.

The earliest iterations of Hackety Hack were based on an embedded Gecko browser, but this eventually transformed into the Shoes GUI toolkit.

There are two major differences: Both of these projects use a graphical programming language based on the concept of "blocks," but Hackety Hack teaches Ruby.

The 'blocks' solution is to use the concepts of graphical programming so that beginners don't have to worry about syntactical or memorization issues, as there's a palette of blocks to choose from, and they only fit together in the correct way.

The solution that Hackety Hack pursues is by teaching with a more traditional programming language, but adding libraries that make it easy to do complicated tasks in one line.