The Hackerlab at `regexps.com`

## On Hacking

up: libhackerlab

                    Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
                    Let us go and make our visit.

                    -- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Shall I spell out the perfect architecture for our software? Predict the form of what we'll build? Construct a fictional schedule and a list of milestones? Prepare a glossy presentation outlining all the planned features? Magically forecast the size of markets and our share? Foretell our winning marketing strategy? Calculate ROI over a three year period to an impossible precision?

Or shall we speak of truth?

                    Hacking

            In nightclubs, living rooms,
               computer labs at midnight,

            Over meals and after shows,
               when sprinklers come on at 3AM

            Fresh, strung out;
               sober, tripping

            We have talked and talked,
               experimented,
               lived,
               as beautiful ideas
                 took hold of our bodies
                 and led them
            here

            ``Yes -- it will work like this.''

            ``And like that too.''

            And we should build it this way:
               without pain
               without a master plan
               by feel
                 and feedback
               informed by knowledge
                 and joy
                 and life

            After all:
              _That_
              is how
              the ancestors
              worked

And off we went. Into academia. Into the industry. Each with hopes of making real our portion of the good ideas. Has it worked so far?

Intellegence, perspective, and initiative have become de-valued qualities in programmers; thoughtlessness and rapidity at filling out mediocre code templates have aquired a high market value. Even "new" approaches to computing, for example Linux, are aimed more at reimplementing what has already been done than at informed innovation and exploration.

Many of the best hackers find that there is neither commercial nor academic support for autonomy and sustained work on long term projects. When conditions arise that enable someone to carefully design an elegant tool or a beautiful piece of computing art, those conditions are typically unstable and the result of a very rare accident.

Cynicism and resignation have become our survival skills.

We think this industry stinks.

            I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
                    madness, starving hysterical naked,
            dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
                    looking for an angry fix,
            angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
                    connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
                    ery of night,
            who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
                    up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
                    cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
                    contemplating jazz

                            -- A. Ginsburg, Howl

Let's fix things, shall we?

libhackerlab: The Hackerlab C Library
The Hackerlab at `regexps.com`