Sorry, I downvoted the node for two reasons. One, it's the old splitting of semantic hairs that is all too cliche on geek forums. Two, you're in full-rant mode and don't stay on topic.

Dictionary. Nobody's going to teach the lay public a new definition by babbling on a geek forum. Hack is "penetrate" to the vulnerable. Hack is "tinker" to the tinkerer. Hack is "novice" to the journeyman. Hack is "kludge" to the academic.

There's nothing wrong with being clever to stay efficient, but efficiency and effectiveness are often at odds. If your one-liner solution doesn't cover foreseeable future usage, then it should be rethought now. The opposite is also true with your points about over-engineering. Maintenance programmers HATE clever stuff that doesn't fit the rest of the style of the project. "Thar be magick hyeer."

If you get dirty looks from your teammates for diverging from the team's approach, who is at fault? The Demotivator pattern here is "Dysfunction: The Only Consistent Feature of All of Your Dissatisfying Relationships is You."

These issues exist in any programming language. Why in the heck do you then go onto a tirade about languages? Ruby and Python aren't going to solve your culture and team attitude problems. The "death to Java" closing line is just immature.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

In reply to Re: Fighting the denigration of hacking by halley
in thread Fighting the denigration of hacking by flyingmoose

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