How To Become A Hacker

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.

Intuitive as this may seem, it ends up being the opposite: you'll see more "functional-like" code in Ruby codebases. A simple think like Guido considering multi-line lambdas "a Rube Goldberg language feature" [1] and rejecting them was sort of a butterfly effect that pushed real-world ruby codebases away from functional programming. Same as the nice-looking block passing syntax pushed Ruby in the opposite direction! And makes Ruby DSLs easy as pie (though I find DSLs a bit against the "hacker spirit" - any tool that's less "general purposes" ends up "limiting your mind" - take Rails which is a giant "meta-DSL for web apps" imho).

...though I still recommend Python to wannabe "hackers" for the same reasons you said above, I find myself, as a "real-world hacker", enjoying Ruby more.

[1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358

I actually remember reading ESRs writings as a teenager and actually being slightly afraid of ending up like him.