Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Stallman/Torvalds Story, definition of 'Hacker'

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the covering-the-rise dept.

/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. "

3 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Emacs text editor and compiler? by Jamie+Zawinski · · Score: 4
    I wouldn't count the lisp psuedocompiler as a "real" compiler, either.

    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?

  2. Time to set the record straight on RMS and on LISP by Freed · · Score: 3

    There must be only a few people on /. who appreciate true hackers. To take an example from the Levy classic Hackers (p. 426):

    ...A virtual John Henry of computer code, RMS had singlehandedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers, and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983. "In a fairly real sense," Greenblatt noted at the time, "he's been outhacking the whole bunch of them."

    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.

  3. hacker definition by keefer · · Score: 3

    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.