in reply to Re: Fighting the denigration of hacking
in thread Fighting the denigration of hacking

I'm not discussing the meaning of the word, neccesarily, but the perception of the concept that the particular definition represents.

Elaboration: In one circle, programming of a certain type (i.e. cleverness) is good, on these other fronts, cleverness is discouraged, and looking at the exact same line of code, one might here "Nice hack!" and "Urgh! I hate to see that kind of hack there". It's hackscrimination :)

Merlyn's definitely right regarding non-tech circles though. It's the trend in tech-circles that seems to be weird. Programmers that don't like cleverness of any kind, whether you call it "hacking" or not. And they have management's ear. Gotta shake that up.

Ok, seeing I have confused everyone, I'll leave it at that.

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Re: Re: Re: Fighting the denigration of hacking
by allolex (Curate) on Feb 07, 2004 at 21:36 UTC

    Maybe it's because they associate the word with doing things fast (and not necessarily 'cleverly'). For Perl this is a matter of course, but which for some other languages (maybe Java, I wouldn't know), it tends to indicate sloppy coding? I still think there are social issues that might be playing a role. Or maybe they just don't understand what you're doing and cover up by disapproving. Of course all of this is pure conjecture. Best of luck to you!

    --
    Allolex