I would guess from the responses I've read that many here don't even get that 'hacking' refers to messing with pre-existing code to make it meet your needs rather than develoment from scratch, let alone code themselves, but some even 'real' programmers have to find other pursuits other than coding all day every day. Some of us have to do something while we're at work on a Saturday for I don't know how many Saturdays in a row waiting for an rtag of a cvs branch to finish.
Besides, mindless discussions are a good break from looking at lines of code all day...
The reason I like computer jockey, by the way, is it makes the seemingly inane world of software development sound like what it is to many of us; something interesting and sometimes, yes, even exciting.
Also, the original message seemed to me not to be looking for a word which the media will pick up on and use as it does the word 'hackers', but rather a word or phrase we can embrace to describe a particular approach to working with code. Who gives a flying f-word what the media calls people who hack on code. The issue here is the media took a prefectly good term and gave it bad connotations because they used it to describe a group of people who other groups of people look down on.
Slashdot Mirror
I would guess from the responses I've read that many here don't even get that 'hacking' refers to messing with pre-existing code to make it meet your needs rather than develoment from scratch, let alone code themselves, but some even 'real' programmers have to find other pursuits other than coding all day every day. Some of us have to do something while we're at work on a Saturday for I don't know how many Saturdays in a row waiting for an rtag of a cvs branch to finish.
Besides, mindless discussions are a good break from looking at lines of code all day...
The reason I like computer jockey, by the way, is it makes the seemingly inane world of software development sound like what it is to many of us; something interesting and sometimes, yes, even exciting.
Also, the original message seemed to me not to be looking for a word which the media will pick up on and use as it does the word 'hackers', but rather a word or phrase we can embrace to describe a particular approach to working with code. Who gives a flying f-word what the media calls people who hack on code. The issue here is the media took a prefectly good term and gave it bad connotations because they used it to describe a group of people who other groups of people look down on.
(And yes, I remembered my password, finally...)