From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!eagle!cw Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Is "Hacker" Good? Article-I.D.: eagle.332 Posted: Sat Jun 5 18:36:51 1982 Received: Sun Jun 6 00:49:19 1982 I have never thought that "hacker" was a pleasant term. Would you, for example, want a carpenter to work on your house who was described as a "hacker"? As far as I can tell, "hacker"'s program with axes. There are two mitigations, however. 1. Many hackers have considerable (if disorganized) knowledge and can be a help with difficult problems because they have been through the problem themselves. However, they very often specify local fixes rather than globab corrections, so that you have to evaluate their help carefully. 2. Many good computer scientists describe themselves as "hacker"'s as a way of being modest. Without going into psychoanalytic space, I always try to judge a self-proclaimed hacker's skills for myself. Finally, has anyone else noticed that hacker's spend their undergraduate years in the computer center, get terrific jobs for 3 years, and then burn out? This is a statement of averages, of course, but it seems to be a pattern. Charles