How To Become A Hacker

Sounds like a pretty weak criticism to me. We all reflect our own biases and opinions in our writings, surely? If pg wrote "how to be a hacker" wouldn't you wind up with something suggesting that hackers should be like pg? If rtm wrote "how to be a hacker" do you think it wouldn't wind up reflecting a bias towards his mindsets and attitudes? If onan_barbarian wrote "how to be a hacker" would it not create an argument for hackers being much like onan_barbarian?

If esr's essay is factually incorrect or misleading or damaging in some fashion, then I'd encourage anyone to criticize it for that, rather than just slamming the man for writing it.

Books and essays like "Management secrets of Gengis Khan" are an attempt at invoking this kind of power, that the writer is both knowledgeable enough and the topic is relevant enough to the times in which it appears to hold sway in some way (if only for book sales, natch). If nobody cares who the "Gengis Khan" author is and their way of describing what they're talking about reaches enough people to operate a (sub-) cultural transformation, then the words will therefore have little meaning in the practical sense.

To be sure, writers write from their own subjectivity. This cannot be avoided, so to critique something as having too much of the author in it is a little beyond the pale (pace Derrida). The last century-plus of philosophy and critical exercise have taught us that objectivity doesn't exist (irony intentional); there will always be hints of the writer's mind, biases, and so on. So of course the Jargon File is going to have ESR's fingerprints all over it.

We can talk about how the JF's corpus is weak and riddled with a particular subjectivity, but the simple facts are that it's accessible, easy to digest, and an early description of many, many concepts of the subcultures affiliated with computers. It acquires authority this way, regardless of followers-on and critiques. It's the same problem the Bible and other major religious texts have, but it's also germane to the scope of things like operational best practices, equity allocation, and any other topic where there are schools of thought. The critique raised here is simply another front in a battle between schools. Steven Levy articulated an infinitely more detailed description of hackers, but that has a concomitant inaccessiblity (length), but in my mind equally valid. At the end of the day, we may as well be talking about what band is the most Rock.

I think it relates to your point, because another way to say this is that it's presented in an obnoxiously (to me) self-help-book-esque fashion. If it was called "The Workings of a Hacker's World" or some such, I'd find it less grating.

I assume this is the Dabblers and Blowhards post to which you refer: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm ... thanks, I'll give it a read.

Sure, you can argue that if a person gives an opinion of what it means to be "X", then he superimposes his own idea of "X" upon the abstract "X", as it were. But I believe that that abstract "X" doesn't exist (in and of itself), and all we have are labels ("hacker") which lend a solidity to something that is inherently fluid. Even if there is such a concrete abstract that we all understand and agree on (Plato's 'perfect form', if you will), in the bottom of your heart (and logically, for that matter), you must acknowledge that the abstract "hacker" is far superior than any of the forms you and I can conceive (name drop here if you wish). All we can manage are ghosts and reflections of that, sometimes beautiful, but inherently incomplete. I thank Mr Raymond for this gem in particular:

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

4. Freedom is good.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

Which enlightened my twelve year old mind in a manner that I fear is no longer possible.

I read this back when I was 12 in 2000. It got me into programming, made me learn to use Linux. That Zen Koan at the beginning is something that has grown with me over the years, it took me a long time to see how loaded those six lines are; therein truly lies the means to mastery of any path.

I will never forget the feeling of realising that my partitioning command had failed and now I had no access to my windows machine (and thus, the internet and anybody that could help me). Luckily, I had printed out the Gentoo manual (I was obsessed with apparent speed increases that could be achieved by compiling everything for your own arch) and I managed to get a dial up connection (yes, we still had dial-up in South Africa in 2000 :) working and some basic text-based browsing to continue the mission. ah.

> there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition

> (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to

> progress

You know, he does make the point that it is OK to pursue a superior solution:

Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better.

Solution to what problem? I would say that the reason browsers have continued to evolve is that all of the existing ones have always sucked; whatever problem past browsers thought they were solving, it wasn't sufficient to solve the real problems users were having with existing browsers.

In short, no problem should ever have to be solved twice; but it does need to be solved once.

Same for a lot of programming languages.

Same for a lot of things.

Technology seems to progress by a combination of people's interest and snagging at the low-hanging fruit of "this has become unbearable". At some point, a better gif would have happened just because it hit the proper pain point.

When it comes down to it, he is a politician, a lobbyist and while these roles are arguably not without use I would rather not have someone like that lay down the law what I as a "hacker" should and should not do or how I am supposed to be more like him.

Which, I think, is one of the main reasons why Python is recommended more: it's simpler and has less sharp corners. The other thing is that Ruby is significantly slanted towards the object-oriented paradigm while Python remains much more neutral in this regard.