On 12/14/06, Benjamin Franksen
Kirsten Chevalier wrote:
(Since, of course, one should never apply the term "hacker" to oneself.)
Who told you that?
The Jargon File. But yes, I can anticipate more or less all of the possible responses to *that*, and, point taken.
Calling oneself 'hacker' is a sign of healthy self-respect; to the contrary, I don't know anyone who would call themselves wannabe-hacker.
Well, I hope so, since I contradict my own advice and call myself a hacker anyway :-)
Being a hacker is a matter of attitude and self-definition more than knowledge and experience. A hacker, even if young and lacking experience, reads books for hackers (if at all) not 'how do I become a hacker' books. The attitude is 'gimme the knowledge so i can go ahead and start doing real stuff', not 'oh, there is so much to learn, maybe after 10 years of study and hard work people will finally call me a hacker'.
Very reasonable. Very sane. Speaking of the term "hacker" and of various subcultures, the way in which Haskell and the open-source community seem to have met each other this year just makes me melt with joy. I know it wasn't like that six years ago; the Haskell community was small, and there wasn't exactly such a thing as the "open-source community" (and please let's not have a "free software" vs. "open source" debate, because I've heard that all before, too). I don't know exactly what happened in the meantime, besides the miracle of this vast series of tubes that we cann the Internet, but someone should really be writing a sociology paper about it. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "The geeks shall inherit the earth." -- Karl Lehenbauer