Teaching Python

[Westley Martínez]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 05:11:32PM +0100, MRAB wrote:
> On 21/04/2011 14:58, Westley Martínez wrote:
> >On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 06:02:08AM +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote:
> >>Ben Finney, 20.04.2011 02:06:
> >>>Dan Stromberg writes:
> >>>
> >>>>On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 4:03 PM, geremy condra wrote:
> >>>>>When you say 'hacking', you mean.... ?
> >>>>
> >>>>Presumably he meant the real meaning of the word, not what the press
> >>>>made up and ran with.
> >>>
> >>>To be fair, the press already had its own pejorative meaning of “hack”
> >>>before the engineering and computing term
> >>
> >>Not anywhere outside of the English language that I'm aware of,
> >>though. In German, it's a computing-only term that's used in both
> >>contexts by those who understand why the pointer is moving over the
> >>screen when moving the mouse, and almost exclusively in a bad
> >>context by those who write news paper articles (and, consequently,
> >>by those who innocently read them).
> >>
> >>Stefan
> >>
> >>--
> >>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> >
> >O Lord, I'd hope we'd be speaking for English here.  But really, hack
> >has always been a negative term.  It's original definition is chopping,
> >breaking down, kind of like chopping down the security on someone elses
> >computer.  Now I don't know where the term originally came from, but the
> >definition the media uses is quite a fair use.  Why should we call
> >ourselves hackers anyways?  I don't smoke.  I'm no different from anyone
> >else, I just happen to know a lot about computers.  Should we call
> >people who know a lot about the economy hackers, too, or perhaps we
> >should call them economists....
> 
> As I understand it, "hacking" is about not doing the job "properly".
> When trying to make something, a hacker will use the equivalent of duct
> tape to hold things together.
> 
> A computer hacker doesn't write the requirements of the software or
> draw Jackson Structured Programming diagrams, etc, but just thinks
> about what's needed and starts writing the code.

That's a cowboy coder.