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

[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.