When I saw people saying stuff like "hacking a salad" I considered this term lost forever. Putting food together is not hacking a salad people, it's literally making one.
I concur: the term 'hacking' has become hopelessly diluted by wannabe use applied to unrelated activities that are only very weakly analogous.
A 'hack' is a self-deprecating description of a quick and dirty programming job, anybody who proudly self-describes something they've done as hacking has totally missed the point. It used to be that one could not self-style oneself as a hacker but rather became one when others who are recognised as such begin referring to one as such.
(I used to be referred to as being one, but I gave up my fascination with computer security and exotic computer science concepts in the mid 2000s.)
Hacking doesn't need to be self-deprecating. I'm proud of some of my work that I consider a hack.
When I worked in finance, I hacked together a bridge between an FIXML order pub/sub service and a proprietary exchange server. Was it my best work? Obviously not. Was it ugly as sin? Hell yes. Did I slap it out in a few weeks? Yup. Did it prop up the business for the 18 months it needed to develop a "real" solution? Yeah.
That ugly hack probably earned the business millions in revenue.
Though I also concur; the term hacker is overused, diluted and twisted in meaning, and I have no interest in bringing it back.
"Growth hacking" is another pointless phrase. The words "hacking" and "hacker" have become pretty useless, actually. They just mean way too many things to different people. One might just as well replace "hacker" with "person" and "hacking" with "doing".
qubex|9 years ago
A 'hack' is a self-deprecating description of a quick and dirty programming job, anybody who proudly self-describes something they've done as hacking has totally missed the point. It used to be that one could not self-style oneself as a hacker but rather became one when others who are recognised as such begin referring to one as such.
(I used to be referred to as being one, but I gave up my fascination with computer security and exotic computer science concepts in the mid 2000s.)
shaftway|9 years ago
When I worked in finance, I hacked together a bridge between an FIXML order pub/sub service and a proprietary exchange server. Was it my best work? Obviously not. Was it ugly as sin? Hell yes. Did I slap it out in a few weeks? Yup. Did it prop up the business for the 18 months it needed to develop a "real" solution? Yeah.
That ugly hack probably earned the business millions in revenue.
Though I also concur; the term hacker is overused, diluted and twisted in meaning, and I have no interest in bringing it back.
kluck|9 years ago
bbcbasic|9 years ago
mbrock|9 years ago
https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html