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Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 06:58:10 -0700
From: Westley =?iso-8859-1?Q?Mart=EDnez?= <anikom15@gmail.com>
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: Teaching Python
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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....