Teaching Python

[Westley Martínez]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 01:25:00AM +0100, MRAB wrote:
> On 21/04/2011 23:36, Westley Martínez wrote:
> >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.
> 
> A cowboy coder is someone who's bad at coding, a hacker is someone
> who's good at it.

Wrong, sir!  Wrong!  Cowboys are awesome.