I agree to an extent, but I have a few points which I'd like to add. First, the term hacker means different things to many different people, so I guess I'll give my definition. After reading Richard Stallman's biography (sort of), Free As In Freedom, I got a new (gnu? :P) perspective on the term. For one, I like your use saying that a hacker utilizes a systme or product, but I would replace 'unimplemented' for 'unintended'. There could be a number of reasons why functionality isn't in a software system, and unintended to me seems a bit restrictive. Also, RMS always (at least in the book) categorized himself as a hacker, but writing an OO layer over and RDBMS doesn't seem to be quite as complex as rolling your own C compiler suite (or say, writing your own language interpreter for a your new language based on C, sed, awk...you can see where I'm going), so complexity, scale and planning really wouldn't seem to be an issue either. The OO layer might be more structured, but really, writing a compiler and linker for a language that you didn't develop for a platform you didn't develop has its own inherent structure too. Again, that's just my recently-propagandized-by-his-book opinion, and I'll probably calm down about the subject in a few weeks.

That being said though, I'll leave the semantics to someone else and just stick with Perl hacker.

In reply to Re**3: The new 'hacker' word? by charnos
in thread The new 'hacker' word? by BUU

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