Does the hacker ethic help or harm todays developers?
I’m a hacker and proud of it. What I know about programming is mostly self-taught. Back in the 1980s, I cut my teeth on Basic before moving on to Pascal, machine language, C, and even such obscure languages as Forth. For me, the joy of programming was in exploration and experimentation. The computer was a world where I was free to tinker to my heart’s content, and the knowledge I gained was its own reward. There’s a whole generation just like me, but today the world of programming is arguably even more accessible. Novices might start by working with HTML and JavaScript before moving on to PHP, or maybe by writing Visual Basic macros for their spreadsheets and eventually graduating to full-scale application development. Introductory tools abound, such as Microsoft’s Small Basic, and never in history has more quality application source code been available for students to learn from. Computing may be big business today, but the hacker spirit is still alive and well. [ Dive into the perils
