See post: http://antirez.com/news/123
This piece may be more for those of us who not only view ourselves as professional developers, but would in fact describe ourselves as programmers outside of work – of better yet, as hacking.
While this may evoke images of long, unkempt beards, empty cans of caffeinated beverages strewn about an otherwise even messier workspace, and perhaps not the most culturally sensitive discourse, in fact hacking is at the core of such great contributions to society as the Internet, radio astronomy, and very much anything in the spirit of accidental discovery. While it’s always nice to find something you suspect of being that, far more interesting is when you uncover something amazing that you did NOT expect to be where you were looking.
This is the spirit of discovery that imbues hacking. But we cannot travel down this path without first having that playful cleverness, as Richard Stallman called it, where you do something not for any particularly practical reason, but rather, because, ultimately, you just want to. How many times I find myself at a blank terminal window, about to do something I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times before, and I get the thought, “let me try it this way this time, and see if it works the same”.
So, I just felt the need to celebrate something playfully clever done in what can be called the true spirit of hacking.
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17969843