The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

their homes.

Node:Other Interests, Next:[15251]Physical Activity and Sports,

Previous:[15252]Reading Habits, Up:[15253]Appendix B

Other Interests

Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the

culture: science fiction, music, medievalism (in the active form

practiced by the Society for Creative Anachronism and similar

organizations), chess, go, backgammon, wargames, and intellectual

games of all kinds. (Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons

used to be extremely popular among hackers but they lost a bit of

their luster as they moved into the mainstream and became heavily

commercialized. More recently, "Magic: The Gathering" has been widely

popular among hackers.) Logic puzzles. Ham radio. Other interests that

seem to correlate less strongly but positively with hackerdom include

linguistics and theater teching.

Node:Physical Activity and Sports, Next:[15254]Education,

Previous:[15255]Other Interests, Up:[15256]Appendix B

Physical Activity and Sports

Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and

are determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in

spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one

does, not something one watches on TV.

Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague. Volleyball

was long a notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and

relatively friendly; Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular for

similar reasons. Hacker sports are almost always primarily

self-competitive ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor

skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking,

rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling,

skiing, skating, skydiving, scuba diving. Hackers' delight in

techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty

complicated equipment that they can tinker with.

The popularity of martial arts in the hacker culture deserves special

mention. Many observers have noted it, and the connection has grown

noticeably stronger over time. In the 1970s, many hackers admired

martial arts disciplines from a distance, sensing a compatible ideal

in their exaltation of skill through rigorous self-discipline and

concentration. As martial arts became increasingly mainstreamed in the

U.S. and other western countries, hackers moved from admiring to doing

in large numbers. In 1997, for example, your humble editor recalls

sitting down with five strangers at the first Perl conference and

discovering that four of us were in active training in some sort of

martial art - and, what is more interesting, nobody at the table found

this particularly odd.

Today (2000), martial arts seems to have become established as the

hacker exercise form of choice, and the martial-arts culture combining

skill-centered elitism with a willingness to let anybody join seems a

stronger parallel to hacker behavior than ever. Common usages in

hacker slang un-ironically analogize programming to kung fu (thus, one

hears talk of "code-fu" or in reference to specific skills like

"HTML-fu"). Albeit with slightly more irony, today's hackers readily

analogize assimilation into the hacker culture with the plot of a Jet

Li movie: the aspiring newbie studies with masters of the tradition,

develops his art through deep meditation, ventures forth to perform

heroic feats of hacking, and eventually becomes a master who trains

the next generation of newbies.

Node:Education, Next:[15257]Things Hackers Detest and Avoid,

Previous:[15258]Physical Activity and Sports, Up:[15259]Appendix B

Education

Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or

self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often

considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may

be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas

from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the

obvious computer science and electrical engineering) physics,

mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.

Node:Things Hackers Detest and Avoid, Next:[15260]Food,

Previous:[15261]Education, Up:[15262]Appendix B

Things Hackers Detest and Avoid

IBM mainframes. All the works of Microsoft. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other

forms of offensive cuteness. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy

listening music. Television (with occasional exceptions for cartoons,

movies, and good SF like "Star Trek" classic or Babylon 5). Business

suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence. Boredom. COBOL. BASIC.

Character-based menu interfaces.

Node:Food, Next:[15263]Politics, Previous:[15264]Things Hackers Detest

and Avoid, Up:[15265]Appendix B

Food

Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most esp. Szechuan, Hunan,

and Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely d�class�). Hackers

prefer the exotic; for example, the Japanese-food fans among them will

eat with gusto such delicacies as fugu (poisonous pufferfish) and

whale. Thai food has experienced flurries of popularity. Where

available, high-quality Jewish delicatessen food is much esteemed. A

visible minority of Southwestern and Pacific Coast hackers prefers

Mexican.

For those all-night hacks, pizza and microwaved burritos are big.

Interestingly, though the mainstream culture has tended to think of

hackers as incorrigible junk-food junkies, many have at least mildly

health-foodist attitudes and are fairly discriminating about what they

eat. This may be generational; anecdotal evidence suggests that the

stereotype was more on the mark before the early 1980s.

Node:Politics, Next:[15266]Gender and Ethnicity, Previous:[15267]Food,

Up:[15268]Appendix B

Politics

Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent

which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe

generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian;

thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard' leftism are rare.

Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be

aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic

political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.

Node:Gender and Ethnicity, Next:[15269]Religion,

Previous:[15270]Politics, Up:[15271]Appendix B

Gender and Ethnicity

Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of

women is clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for

technical professions, and female hackers are generally respected and

dealt with as equals.

In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong

minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish

contingent has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence

(see [15272]Food, above, and note that several common jargon terms are

obviously mutated Yiddish).

The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a

function of which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education.

Racial and ethnic prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met

with freezing contempt.

When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and

color-blindness to a positive effect of text-only network channels,

and this is doubtless a powerful influence. Also, the ties many

hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to

develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive

-- after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to

future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens,

mere color and gender can't seem very important any more.

Node:Religion, Next:[15273]Ceremonial Chemicals,

Previous:[15274]Gender and Ethnicity, Up:[15275]Appendix B

Religion

Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly,

three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional

faith-holding Christianity is rare though not unknown.

Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be

relaxed about it, hostile to organized religion in general and all

forms of religious bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody'

religions such as Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius.

Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism

or (less commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native'

religions.

There is a definite strain of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility

that shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with

neo-paganism, Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage

to `wizards' and speaks of incantations and demons has too much

psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a joke.

Node:Ceremonial Chemicals, Next:[15276]Communication Style,

Previous:[15277]Religion, Up:[15278]Appendix B

Ceremonial Chemicals

Most hackers don't smoke tobacco, and use alcohol in moderation if at

all. However, there has been something of a trend towards exotic beers

since about 1995, especially among younger Linux hackers apparently

influenced by Linus Torvalds's fondness for Guiness.

Limited use of non-addictive psychedelic drugs, such as cannabis, LSD,

psilocybin, nitrous oxide, etc., used to be relatively common and is

still regarded with more tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use

of `downers' and opiates, on the other hand, appears to be

particularly rare; hackers seem in general to dislike drugs that make

them stupid. But [15279]on the gripping hand, many hackers regularly

wire up on caffeine and/or sugar for all-night hacking runs.

Node:Communication Style, Next:[15280]Geographical Distribution,

Previous:[15281]Ceremonial Chemicals, Up:[15282]Appendix B

Communication Style

See the discussions of speech and writing styles near the beginning of

this File. Though hackers often have poor person-to-person

communication skills, they are as a rule quite sensitive to nuances of

language and very precise in their use of it. They are often better at

writing than at speaking.

Node:Geographical Distribution, Next:[15283]Sexual Habits,

Previous:[15284]Communication Style, Up:[15285]Appendix B

Geographical Distribution

In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis;

about half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of

Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are

significant contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and

around Washington DC. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities,

especially `university towns' such as the Raleigh-Durham area in North

Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact

that many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).

Node:Sexual Habits, Next:[15286]Personality Characteristics,

Previous:[15287]Geographical Distribution, Up:[15288]Appendix B

Sexual Habits

Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle

variation than the mainstream culture. It includes a relatively large

gay and bisexual contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to live

in polygynous or polyandrous relationships, practice open marriage, or

live in communes or group houses. In this, as in general appearance,

hackerdom semi-consciously maintains `counterculture' values.

Node:Personality Characteristics, Next:[15289]Weaknesses of the Hacker

Personality, Previous:[15290]Sexual Habits, Up:[15291]Appendix B

Personality Characteristics

The most obvious common `personality' characteristics of hackers are

high intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual

abstractions. Also, most hackers are `neophiles', stimulated by and

appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty). Most are

also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.

Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not

the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more

important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large

amounts of `meaningless' detail, trusting to later experience to give

it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical

intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a

creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by

people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals

into their brains. [During the production of the first book version of

this document, for example, I learned most of the rather complex

typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly by

inhaling Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction

to this genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with

hackers have conditioned me to consider such performances routine and

to be expected. --ESR]

Contrary to stereotype, hackers are not usually intellectually narrow;

they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental

stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even

interestingly on any number of obscure subjects -- if you can get them

to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.

It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that

the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to

have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely

competent.

Hackers are `control freaks' in a way that has nothing to do with the

usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In the same

way that children delight in making model trains go forward and back

by moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like

computers do nifty stuff for them. But it has to be their nifty stuff.

They don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy, boring,

ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a normal existence.

Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their intellectual

lives and chaotic elsewhere. Their code will be beautiful, even if

their desks are buried in 3 feet of crap.

Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional

rewards such as social approval or money. They tend to be attracted by

challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the interest

of