I find this confusing since Zen is the strain of Buddhism developed in Japan. Green Tea, a.k.a. Cha or Sen Cha (possibly derived from your reference, i.e. Zen-Cha) DOES NOT HAVE CAFFEINE IN IT.
... what blasted me was the immediate link to Hacker habits of drinking Coffee and Caffeinated Drinks to be able to stay up late and code.And Truck Driver habits of Black Beauties, and med students, internists, air traffic controllers... There are a LOT of speed addicts in our very demanding society that you are excluding in your comparison...
The question i pose, here, is: "Does the community of PerlMonks strive to represent the spirituality (lost in time) of using Caffeine as a 'Gift from the Gods'?"Simple Answer: NO. Caffeine is a tool, computers are tools, vi & emacs are tools. People who fight about their favorite tools are Fools!
"Should we dare to call ourselves PerlMonks if we're just fascinated by caffeine and we've lost our sense of respect towards it and ourselves as well?"Dare? You've missed the point. Perlmonks is a metaphor, the 'monastery' is a metaphor. It implies a place to study quietly & contemple without distraction. What on Earth are you talking about?
and then, "If not, what should we do to be a real community and not a bunch of silly children playing the "hacker" role without being it?"Is this hacker-monks? No. Does this site promote hacking? Yes & No. Hacking in the traditional geek definition is anyone who's so good with computers that you can't understand how they do it & it takes on the semblance of magic...more or less. The other meaning is sometimes referred to as Cracking & that is generally considered to be either illegal, presumptuous, and/or destructive behavior. Every single time someone posts a script that can be used maliciously or illegally it generally gets taken down. Take the recent hubub about the DeCSS script(s) as an example... Or a votebot, etc..
I know, reading somethin' like the "Jargon File" or "Conscience of a Hacker" can be *really* fascinating, but it won't resolve in drinking a whole lot of coffee and waiting for someone to code for us the "Definitive Hacking Tool". Let's start writing real code and learn from errors!I take this as being somewhat obnoxious to our bretheren in that you imply that we're a bunch of 'script kiddies'... While that might be the case sometimes, there's plenty of the 'REAL' variety of hackers here, TO BE SURE. And I believe I represent the majority of people here when I say that this is a "real" community.
If you want to play with existing code & make your "Definitive Hacking Tool" then start with the source code for something like SATAN/SANTA by Dan Farmer, which is written in Perl, for the most part & put the industry on it's ear for a month or two. But at least it was written as a means to try to help system administrators keep up with CERN warnings and so has a positive application, while most 'exploits' do not.
In reply to Re: (Sigmund)Monks, Zen, Caffeine and Hacker Habits
by gregor42
in thread (Perl)Monks, Zen, Caffeine and Hacker Habits
by Sigmund
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