On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 05:11:32PM +0100, MRAB wrote: > On 21/04/2011 14:58, Westley Martínez wrote: > >On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 06:02:08AM +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote: > >>Ben Finney, 20.04.2011 02:06: > >>>Dan Stromberg writes: > >>> > >>>>On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 4:03 PM, geremy condra wrote: > >>>>>When you say 'hacking', you mean.... ? > >>>> > >>>>Presumably he meant the real meaning of the word, not what the press > >>>>made up and ran with. > >>> > >>>To be fair, the press already had its own pejorative meaning of “hack” > >>>before the engineering and computing term > >> > >>Not anywhere outside of the English language that I'm aware of, > >>though. In German, it's a computing-only term that's used in both > >>contexts by those who understand why the pointer is moving over the > >>screen when moving the mouse, and almost exclusively in a bad > >>context by those who write news paper articles (and, consequently, > >>by those who innocently read them). > >> > >>Stefan > >> > >>-- > >>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > > > >O Lord, I'd hope we'd be speaking for English here. But really, hack > >has always been a negative term. It's original definition is chopping, > >breaking down, kind of like chopping down the security on someone elses > >computer. Now I don't know where the term originally came from, but the > >definition the media uses is quite a fair use. Why should we call > >ourselves hackers anyways? I don't smoke. I'm no different from anyone > >else, I just happen to know a lot about computers. Should we call > >people who know a lot about the economy hackers, too, or perhaps we > >should call them economists.... > > As I understand it, "hacking" is about not doing the job "properly". > When trying to make something, a hacker will use the equivalent of duct > tape to hold things together. > > A computer hacker doesn't write the requirements of the software or > draw Jackson Structured Programming diagrams, etc, but just thinks > about what's needed and starts writing the code.
That's a cowboy coder. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list