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