Chris Angelico wrote:
Hacking??
1) Tinkering, programming, building furniture with an axe.

2) Breaking and entering in the electronic world.

Not so much.

In the comp.lang.python community hacking is most easily identified with the many one-liners that show up... that is the underlying spirit of hacking.

==== block quote from RMS "On Hacking"=======

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is, restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely, and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to be useful).

==== / block quote from RMS "On Hacking"=======

You can find the entire article here:

http://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/articles/on-hacking.html&term=hacking&type=norm&case=0


kind regards,
m harris
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