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Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 01:25:00 +0100
From: MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com>
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Subject: Re: Teaching Python
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On 21/04/2011 23:36, Westley Martínez wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 05:11:32PM +0100, MRAB wrote:
>> On 21/04/2011 14:58, Westley Martínez wrote:
>>> 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....
>>
>> As I understand it, "hacking" is about not doing the job "properly".
>> When trying to make something, a hacker will use the equivalent of duct
>> tape to hold things together.
>>
>> A computer hacker doesn't write the requirements of the software or
>> draw Jackson Structured Programming diagrams, etc, but just thinks
>> about what's needed and starts writing the code.
>
> That's a cowboy coder.

A cowboy coder is someone who's bad at coding, a hacker is someone
who's good at it.