growth, maybe

[waider]

I spent a lot of time wanting to be a hacker.

I never really made it, but I realise now that that's probably a good thing for me.

I'd written a big long explanation of the above, but part of it concerns people who might conceivably stumble across this at some point, and part of it may be considered offensive to some of my friends, so I'll just leave it at that.

Comments

[sambushell.livejournal.com]

You spent a lot of time wanting to be someone who wrote code, wanting to be someone who gained access to computers without authorisation, wanting to be better at tennis, or wanted to be used to collect turpentine?

[littleamerica.livejournal.com]

Yeah; what sort of hacker?

The Stephen Levy-described spagetti-code-writing sort?

Or the Kevin Mitnick sort?

[waider.livejournal.com]

Some would say there's no real difference.

But I'm not answering the question, anyway. I did say, "I'll leave it at that".

[littleamerica.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to try to draw you out on this one, but I will say this: I work with at least one guy in his mid-thirties/early forties who is dealing with the same thing or something of a similar flavor. He's a serious code monster and compulsive slashdot reader, but he's reached a point where e.g. his renegade Apple-owning persona and his shrewd Apple-shareholder persona are having a hard time getting along, and he increasingly tends to greet their dog property laws mentality with rough scorn.

And this:
Personally I'm at a point where I think "Information Wants to be Free" is a nice metaphor in much the same way that a "selfish gene" is a nice metaphor, but it isn't the sort of thing one founds one's worldview on, and it works poorly in extreme conditions.

[pobig.livejournal.com]

I had a good long muse and accidentally quit mozilla twice, so here's a short one here it is again:

I got massively politicized by reading Hackers back in high school; my father loaned me the hardcover edition soon after it came out. This was actually a further politicization from reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Several years later I decided that definitions were stupid and that I should just do what I liked.

It turns out that I really like what I'm just now thinking of as public works programming. Originally I liked making the computer do things, but once I got used to computers doing things without my help, I got interested in the aesthetics of how they did it, and that and a lot of working with other peoples' code led me into an appreciation of making code as clear and easy to understand as possible. The time working on libpng and chimera and xli was and is some of the happiest I've ever spent, and it feels worthwhile in a way that my day job only very rarely does.

Is that "hacking"? If you define it as programming as an art form, only sort of, or only sometimes. And that's fine with me.