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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems
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To: Mephisto who wrote (27270)2/5/2000 1:58:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh  Read Replies (3) of 64865
 
I understand that a "hacker" is not necessarily bad unless he or she breaks the law.

Very OT: Interesting how word usage changes. Thirty years ago when it was still quite early in my software development life, I had the pleasure of working with a really super programmer by the name of Neil on the design of an on-line database system. He contended that there were two types of programmers -- "real" programmers and "hacks" or "hackers". Real programmers looked at each new programming task as a fresh puzzle to solve, figured out what was needed to solve it, and created a solution. Hacks or hackers, he used both words, would simply copy prior solutions as much as possible and edit them until they worked, more or less. I would guess he was 20 years into his career at that point and said he had only ever met 6 real programmers ... I made 7.

Now, with or without the legality issue, hacker has a much more positive connotation, at least in terms of presumed programming talent, but I confess that I still carry some of Neil's prejudice on the matter since the modern hacker tends to be the sort of person that is very talented at tearing something apart, but often couldn't build much of anything.
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