Larry Wall once reputedly said: "The three attributes of a programmer are; impatience, laziness and hubris". He didn't mean that hackers sit around in front of the TV or wasting their time, that they're too impatient to sit down and take some time to do anything, or so hubristic that they can't listen to other ideas. All three of these attributes have negative connotations, but all are meant in a positive way.
Hackers are impatient as they don't want to hang around wasting time when they could be solving the "real" problem. They don't want to be jumping through pointless political hoops before they can get to real work.
They are lazy because they don't want to have to type in the same command 50 times with small variance in the command - they write a script to do it for them. This script is by far the better solution, not only saving time now, but saving time in the future and expanding the hackers experience and knowledge.
Hackers are hubristic not because they think their ideas are the best, or they can do anything. Far from it, hackers are very often very deferential to other, more senior hackers, and very often use other "good" solutions as part of their own. You need to have some sort of hubris to actually start a bit of work in the first place. Without hubris, the Linux kernel probably would never have been started.
That's funny, I interpreted what he said a bit differently for "impatience" and "hubris". To me, impatience and hubris go hand in hand for a good hacker.
Impatience: Why is this code taking so long?
Hubris: I could write code that is way faster/better than this!
Hackers are impatient as they don't want to hang around wasting time when they could be solving the "real" problem. They don't want to be jumping through pointless political hoops before they can get to real work.
They are lazy because they don't want to have to type in the same command 50 times with small variance in the command - they write a script to do it for them. This script is by far the better solution, not only saving time now, but saving time in the future and expanding the hackers experience and knowledge.
Hackers are hubristic not because they think their ideas are the best, or they can do anything. Far from it, hackers are very often very deferential to other, more senior hackers, and very often use other "good" solutions as part of their own. You need to have some sort of hubris to actually start a bit of work in the first place. Without hubris, the Linux kernel probably would never have been started.
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UsersAreSmarterThanProgrammers