I am by no means a master at programming; I could at best equate myself to a student, and a student I believe I shall remain. A student will tend to acknowledge a teacher, or perhaps two, that revolutionized the way that student learned; I am no different, though my teachers are far more anonymized. Of fame, _why and chromatic would actually be the teachers in this case.
I won't go into a diatribe of what I respect or don't respect about these men, as it is a matter of personal experience and gain that I gleaned upon their works and gained far more than the collection of their words could account. In the very least, ideas such as hacketyhack and the immense work chromatic does for so many perl modules can account for my praise.
What I truly learned from them, their works and their writings, though, is far greater than their works alone. It is, I believe, in the soul of every hacker, coder, committer; but can it be harnessed, taught or made into objects? Can one of intelligence be taught to better hack, or taught other hacking techniques? Considering the number of blogs that exist out there that try and tell you what you need to know to program, either generally, or in this language with this library or API or DSL, I feel there is a large lack of simple, logical promotions of hacking for the kids. hacketyhack belonged to _why, but from it I wish to create a sister project so to speak; not better or worse, parallel. Instead of a "starter kit" for programming, at least to start, just a collection of blog entries into digging into your language's core and how to follow it around: how all those aliases get made and those confusing bash scripts get refactored. Where the yellow brick road truly leads, not just for me, but for any programmer.
hacketyhackopen, is what I will be calling it. Perl and Ruby seem to be the best places to start so I believe I will work on those first; if anyone else wishes to port my writings to their language of choice or would like to see me hacking with a certain language to impress a certain quality of computing, then please, suggest away. Otherwise, I'll slowly work my way through Ruby and Perl's cores or stdlibs or whatever they want to call it. I might use C to accomplish some things, or other GNU tools, but otherwise, for now, I intend to stick with Perl and Ruby.
In case my rambly, dancing forms of speech confuse and tire you, I will begin with a simple example soon.
