My experience has been, if anything, more-or-less the opposite. The good academic programmers I've known have been very focussed on solving the problem at hand

My experience has been, if anything, more-or-less the opposite. The good academic programmers I've known have been very focussed on solving the problem at hand, perhaps without a particularly "engineered" feel to the code (relatively large functions, not necessarily a lot of exposed abstraction, etc.). It's a style I've got a fair bit of respect for, and absolutely would count as "hacker" (in a positive sense) Pretty sure that's what Triplebyte's academic archetype is getting at. Also pointing in broadly the same direction: http://yosefk.com/blog/why-bad-scientific-code-beats-code-following-best-practices.html http://yosefk.com/blog/why-bad-scientific-code-beats-code-fo...