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)

Point taken with respect to project complexity, but I guess I just wouldn't call those types of projects 'hacking' ; )

...so complexity, scale and planning really wouldn't seem to be an issue either

Scale and complexity, no; planning, yes. To my mind, the critical difference between hacking and programming is the amount of structure and forethought that have gone into the undertaking. Now, RMS may want to call himself a hacker, and claim that all his software projects therefore are acts of hacking, but IMO this definition is too broad. That's why in my formulation I stress that hacking involves a deviation from author intent or preexisting structure of the codebase, or is just plain old screwing around.

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

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.