ix222 (02/16/83)
As i was driving to school this afternoon the impossible occurred
to me: a new derivation of the jargoniom 'hack'. i present
it here with a little hacker's fight song to show the spirit.
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HACK (hak) (hok if you love jersy); NOUN -- originally,
any person with a knack for coercing stubborn inanimate
things; hence, a person with a happy knack, later contracted
by the mythical philosopher Frisbee Frobenius to the
common usage, 'hack'. VERB -- ...
in olden times, upon completion of some particularly atrocious
body of coding that happened to work well, culpable programmers
would gather in a small circle around a first edition of Knuth's
Best Volumne I by candlelight, and proceed to get very drunk
while sporadically rending the following ditty:
Hacker's Fight Song
He's a Hack! He's a Hack!
He's a guy with the happy knack!
Never bungles, never shirks,
Always gets his stuff to work!
(all take a drink (important!))
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happy reading,
steve serocki
{ucbvax philabs};sdcsvax;sdccsu3;ix222
flames, as always, are welcomed.