From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,44cbdb49f88ea423 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: mark.lorenzen@ofir.dk (Mark Lorenzen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Another article involving Ada on /. Date: 29 Jun 2004 01:42:24 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <22d0b121.0406290042.2129744a@posting.google.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.163.1.105 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1088498544 30013 127.0.0.1 (29 Jun 2004 08:42:24 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 08:42:24 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1993 Date: 2004-06-29T01:42:24-07:00 List-Id: Stan Milam wrote in message news:... > Mark Lorenzen wrote: > > For me "hacker" is a derogatory term. > > > > Goodness, I cannot count the times in 20 years of programming I've been > given a leviathian of a program(s) with no documentation and told to > "fix it or else...." That means hacking through thousands of lines of > code to figure out what is going on. I have made a career of hacking > through broken code to figure out what the heck it did and fix it. I'm > proud of the term "hacker," but I would be leery of the term "cracker." > > Regards, > Stan Milam. Having been exposed to the harsh realities of corporate life for only a little over 5 years, I can not say that I have participated in many projects. I have, however, tried once to hack through thousands of lines of code in order to figure out what happened in a program, and it wasn't fun at all. It was exceptionally boring. For me, engineering (that includes software engineering) is about *construction* with sound engineering methods. I love formal methods and applicative languages as I think they represent sound engineering tools. Sadly nobody uses them - therefore I am also hacking, like more or less everybody else in software "engineering". I am still so young (*cough*) that I have a na�ve hope, that things will be better as the trade matures. But then, has it matured during the last 20 years? Regards, - Mark Lorenzen