From: utzoo!decvax!watmath!jcwinterton Newsgroups: net.misc Title: A hacker by any other name .... Article-I.D.: watmath.2564 Posted: Wed Jun 9 20:04:52 1982 Received: Thu Jun 10 01:05:48 1982 is still a hack! Or to put it another way, people who write or modify programs on an ad hoc basis than wonder why nobody appreciates the brilliant new trick they have introduced are hacks, hackers, or whatever other pejorative term you care to hang on them. On the other hand, the term "hack" has come to mean something rather complement- ry in some contexts (hacker may be read for hack). The important distinction between the pejorative sense and the other is whether the result is useful, and understandable by the regular, often naive user of the system(s) on which the results of hacking are found. If you are one of those who believes that the documentation of a program is its listing, then you belong to the pejorative group. Anyone who has tried to maintain a program written by one of these types will tell you that they can't usually figure out why or in what context some of the identifiers were chosen, or what the abbreviation style has been in the past. I have had maintenance people come to me in near tears with the request that they be allowed to rewrite some programs to the specification only to have to tell them that the specification doesn't exist be cause my predecessor was a superannuated hack! Grrrr. You know who you are, out there! I think the people who truly are "hacks" in the U of Waterloo sense (complimentary) should be called something else. How about "programmers"? John Winterton