My son was 8 when I got him into HacketyHack, he loved it and made many little desktop apps using HH and it's shoes interface. His favorite apps where ones where the user was asked questions and things happened depending on what the user said. He loved showing friends and relatives.

HH had been abandoned since before _why disappeared. I have to acknowledge Steve and his happy band for recovering the project and getting it to a version 1.0

I don't know the full back story but shoes on which HH is based had many issues as a code base, also HH was originally designed so it would run on PC/Mac/Linux. As a cross platform desktop software the project is in need of more badass devs who are not afraid to do local Dev work on different os's.

My son has learnt a lot of code since he stared with HH and we found he then easily transitioned to Sublime plus shoes but if there were some more HH modules (and greater windows stability), I know even today he'd be keen to jump on there.