Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'.
The «hacker culture», or hackerdom is a loosely networked collection of subcultures that contains 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 to 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, inclusion, and exclusion.
However, among hackers slang has a subtler aspect, which can be paralleled to the slang of jazz musicians and various 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 big range of altered states and problem-solving mental states basic to high-level hacking. Hacker slang encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. For example, there is a 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 the nature of the generative processes in program design. Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that reveal the hackish psychology.
Hackers, as a rule, play with words and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is largely an 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 enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the electronic media which keeps them together are fluid, `hot' connections, well adapted to both adopting of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and exclusion of «weak» and old-fashioned words and word combinations. The results of this process give us 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. Low-context communication is characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances. It 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. Hackerdom is widely known by extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang style.
1.2.1. Hacker subcultures
The most well-known hacker subcultures are:
Crackers;
Phreakers;
LISPers.
Cracking is the act of breaking into the computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this process does not usually involve hackish brilliance, but rather persistence and repetition of tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Crackers are considered to be mediocre hackers. Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. It is expected that any real hacker does some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone is expected to have overcome the desire to do so except for urgent, practical reasons (for example, if it’s necessary to break a security in order to do something lively necessary).
Thus, there is a greater difference between hackerdom and crackerdom than most peoplemisled by sensationalistic journalism might think. Crackers tend to gather in small, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture of hackers; though crackers often describe themselves as hackers; hackers, in their turn, consider crackers a lower form of life; they do not respect anyone who breaks into someone else’s computer.
Phreaking is the art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). By extension, security-cracking is used in any other context (especially, on communications networks). At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was normal, but serious theft of services was a taboo. There was significant crossover between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own. This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers.
LISP (from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses' is a language based on the ideas of variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to a famous saying (a periphrasis of Oscar Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing".
Part II
2.1.Jargon Construction
There are some standard methods of jargonification that became established quite early (i.e., before 1970). These include verb doubling, soundalike slang, the `-P' convention, overgeneralization, spoken inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. These methods, as well as the standard comparatives for design quality are covered below.
Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the `-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish.
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