Hacker History
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Eric S. Raymond (esr@snark.thyrsus.com) provides perhaps the best
introduction to hacker history and their lexicon.
The following is an excerpt from the
"The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000,"
maintained by Eric S. Raymond.
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... The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of
subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared
experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own
myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams.
Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define
themselves partly by rejection of `normal' values and working habits,
it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture
less than 40 years old.
As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold
their culture together -- it helps hackers recognize each other's places
in the community and expresses shared values and experiences. Also as
usual, _not_ knowing the slang (or using it inappropriately) defines
one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish vocabulary)
possibly even a {suit}. All human cultures use slang in this threefold
way -- as a tool of communication, and of inclusion, and of exclusion.
Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps
in the slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard
to detect in most technical or scientific cultures; parts of it are
code for shared states of _consciousness_. There is a whole range of
altered states and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level
hacking which don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any
better than a Coltrane solo or one of Maurits Escher's `trompe l'oeil'
compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang encodes
these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example, take
the distinction between a {kluge} and an {elegant} solution, and the
differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of
engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the
generative processes in program design and asserts something important
about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the hack.
Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones
and undertones that illuminate the hackish psyche.
But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very
conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to
be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are
pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us
before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of
the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers,
by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for
conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique
combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the
discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the
electronic media which knit them together are fluid, `hot' connections,
well adapted to both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless
culling of weak and superannuated specimens. The results of this process
give us perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic
evolution in action.
Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and
anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become
fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus `high-context' communication,
and to classify cultures by the preferred context level of their
languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context
communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness
of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures which value logic,
objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context
communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily
coded) is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus,
cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom,
which is themed around extremely low-context interaction with computers
and exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost
absurdly high-context slang style?
The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a
compilation of hacker slang a particularly effective window into the
surrounding culture -- and, in fact, this one is the latest version of
an evolving compilation called the `Jargon File', maintained by hackers
themselves for over 15 years. This one (like its ancestors) is primarily
a lexicon, but also includes topic entries which collect background or
sidelight information on hacker culture that would be awkward to try to
subsume under individual slang definitions.
...Even a complete outsider should
find at least a chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is amusingly
thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers use humorous wordplay
to make strong, sometimes combative statements about what they feel.
Some of these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes that
have been genuinely passionate; this is deliberate. ... Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must
choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the
line between description and influence can become more than a little
blurred ...