Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out.
It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty.
Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.
Same. Back then, and even now, the people who were busy criticizing other people for using the wrong programming language, text editor, or operating system were a different set of people than the ones actually delivering results.
In a way it was like hacker fashion: These people knew what was hot and what was not. They ran the right window manager on the right hardware and had the right text editor and their shell was tricked out. They knew what to sneer at and what to criticize for fashion points. But actually accomplishing things was, and still is, orthogonal to being fashionable.
To wit: my brother has never worked as a developer and has just a limited knowledge of python. In the past few days, he's designed, vibe-coded, and deployed a four-player online chess game, in about four hours of actual work, using Google's Antigravity. I looked at the code when it was partly done, and it was pretty good.
The gatekeepers wouldn't consider him a hacker, but that's kinda what he is now.
Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out.
It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty.
Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.