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Stallman/Torvalds Story, definition of 'Hacker'
/dev/random writes "I found this quaint little story by David Warsh about GNU, Linux, Opensource, and "hacker"s in the Globe today. I suppose it can pay off to read the business section. "
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I think you hit the point far more precisely than you seem to show. The fight over the meaning of the word 'hacker' is not semantical, but political. It is not about what words actually mean (as ascertained by looking at the use of words in communities), but about what words whould mean.
Personally, I support not calling computer criminals 'hackers', no matter how much some people reply (correctly, but not satisfactory, IMHO) that it is usage that determines meaning, and that in general usage 'hacker' by now means 'computer criminal'. So what. There is a certain outlook on life, a certain world view, in general, a certain set of values that hackers attach to the word 'hacker', that I don't want to be silenced by a mass of script kiddies who have taken over the word, with the aid of a sensationalist and ignorant press.
I won't lose sleep over this, anyway.
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It isn't. When I first heard of such a feature, it was in another language, and I though the exact same thing about it. But when I tried it with Python, it felt just right. Actually, it felt better than having to match braces or forgetting semicolons. What I experienced, simply, was having one less thing to worry about. You just indent your code uniformly (which is good practice, anyway). If you need an expression to span more than one line, you just put it in parenthesis. Python figures out what goes with what.
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On what do you base this insane statement? What is your basis for comparison? C?
Lisp is the single easiest language to learn, teach, or write. And this is in large part the reason for its bad reputation -- since it's easy to write, it's easy for people who have no clue to come up with something that barely works. (Whereas someone of a comparatively low skill level, faced with accomplishing the same task in C, probably won't ever get it to compile -- so you don't get to even see how crummy their C code is.)
Java is interesting in that it slips under the radar of the anti-Lisp bigots by being, essentially, a Lisp dialect with C's abhorrent syntax and bondage-and-discipline approach to data typing grafted on. An interesting hack -- giving up ease-of-use in order to get the rest of what Lisp brings to the party to be more widely accepted.
Well it seems to be (mostly) fixed now. There is still a length limit, but it's higher. For the record, that Emacs timeline I mentioned is "> here .
Then you have some funny definition of the word "compiler" that the rest of the world doesn't share. You seem to think that compilers targetted at virtual machines are not "real" compilers, but that compiler targetted at hardware machines are.
Ok, so I've got gcc, and it's emitting x86 code. Now I execute that code in an x86 emulator. Is gcc suddenly not a "real" compiler?
Now turn it around: I've got a compiler targetted at a virtual machine (the Emacs byte-code engine, the Java VM, whatever.) You say it's not a "real" compiler. Now someone builds a chip that executes that instruction set directly. Now suddenly, magically, it's a "real" compiler again?
Shades of Schrodinger's Cat! You can't know whether it is or isn't a compiler until you open the box?
There must be only a few people on /. who appreciate true hackers. To take an example from the Levy classic Hackers (p. 426):
For the clewbies out there, Greenblatt is also one of the greatest hackers of all time.
One of the other great hackers, Gosper, noted at that time:
"But wait a minute--Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!"
Yes, I am appealing to authority here, and if you cannot appreciate the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper (you can read about them in Part One and the Epilogue of Hackers), then you you certainly cannot appreciate any hacker, including Linus.
Finally, this ignorant bashing of LISP is so typical of clueless folk. To take a seldom-mentioned example of its performance feats, the STALIN scheme (variant of LISP) compiler has outperformed even FORTRAN on some numerical tasks.
Yes, as you may recall, Newton and company called themselves "Natural Philosophers" for lack of any other term.
And even today the word "scientist" hasn't been totally defined -- some people limit it to people in the big three natural sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology) and others define it more broadly to include basically any field in which the goal is to publish papers in overpriced journals.
wow, you just described Richard Feynman there...
Actually I'd take out the "solutions to a given problem" and just define hacker as "anything clever." Aren't the stunts at MIT and CalTech called "hacks?" They certainly weren't solutions to any problems. And the more clever it was, the greater the hack. Just my $0.02.
FRB
Heck, I think there must be a 3D rendering engine and a few early versions of the HURD in there too! And, deep in its inner core, there is a tiny clone of vi that does the text editing. ;-)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Back when I read alt.hackers on a regular basis (early 90s) the general consensus seemed to be that it involved not necessarily programming, but pretty much any clever solution to a given problem. Sometimes it might involve rewiring power tools, sometimes writing/changing code, maybe even just pounding pieces of wood together...
So basically, are we changing the definition of "hacker" again? Or was it always meant to just relate to programming? One thing is for sure, the denizens of alt.hackers certainly agreed that any negative connotation it had was the fault of the press, and wasn't what they were about.
As for myself, I rather like the inclusive definition of doing something clever.