Dylan William Hardison wrote:
> I assume that by "to hack around" Paddy meant "hack" in the original
> sense, such that to hack = "To interact with a computer in a playful and
> exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.'".
>
That's the sense I got for what he was saying to. Personally, I tend to use the term "hack" to refer to basically getting into the guts of something and making changes to its structure. This would involve fiddling with config files until you get stuff working, altering a cgi script to get it to cooperate with your web server's setup, and so on. I guess my mind just tends to associate the term "hack" with the idea of using a hatchet. Functionally, it's about the same as the idea of a "playful and exploratory" activity, but when I use the term it isn't generally so much playful as simply exploratory because there isn't a specific direction to it initially. For instance, if I need to edit smb.conf and I don't know exactly what part of it is giving me connectivity issues, I might experiment by making what seem like likely changes to achieve my aims. If they work, I'm happy. If not, I'll have to put the bits back I changed and hack up some of the rest of it. Thus, I might
hack a config file, but if I write a perl script to automate some set of tasks, I'd call that scripting or programming, not hacking. At the other extreme, I'd call the way I learned HTML "reverse engineering through trial and error".
And now, of course, I've yet again nattered on at length about something of extremely limited interest to anyone else.
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