3 ms·

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

by dimm 16y ago

krainboltgreene 16y ago
While I appreciate his effort, I always felt like that page was a bit too...ideologically stamped. Later on he writes things like: Q: I've been cracked. Will you help me fend off further attacks? A: No. Every time I've been asked this question so far, it's been from some poor sap running Microsoft Windows. It is not possible to effectively secure Windows systems against crack attacks; the code and architecture simply have too many flaws, which makes securing Windows like trying to bail out a boat with a sieve. The only reliable prevention starts with switching to Linux or some other operating system that is designed to at least be capable of security. I don't think that's appropriate, or really needed. I mean sure, even my post is opinionated, but you don't see me telling someone they're an idiot because they don't understand something.
- elemeno 16y ago
  While I don't disagree with you that ESR has a strong ideological tilt, it's also useful to remember that he wrote that quite a long time ago now, when that effectively =was= true. Going back to the subject at hand, I think that the post misses the point that being a 'hacker' isn't really about how many languages you know, it's about certain ways of thinking. The most important, IMO, things to know are all (fairly) language agnostic - algorithms and data structures. If you don't understand those and how they work and how to choose between them, then you're never going to be really good at what you do. Also, you need to learn a functional language well enough that you can solve hard problems using it. Understanding functional programming and all the concepts it introduces (partial evaluation, currying, monads, first class functions, map/reduce to name a few) will do wonders for how you write code in other languages and will make the code you write far cleaner and more readable and easier to extend afterwards.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

by dimm 16y ago

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

While I appreciate his effort, I always felt like that page was a bit too...ideologically stamped. Later on he writes things like: Q: I've been cracked. Will you help me fend off further attacks? A: No. Every time I've been asked this question so far, it's been from some poor sap running Microsoft Windows. It is not possible to effectively secure Windows systems against crack attacks; the code and architecture simply have too many flaws, which makes securing Windows like trying to bail out a boat with a sieve. The only reliable prevention starts with switching to Linux or some other operating system that is designed to at least be capable of security. I don't think that's appropriate, or really needed. I mean sure, even my post is opinionated, but you don't see me telling someone they're an idiot because they don't understand something.

elemeno 16y ago
While I don't disagree with you that ESR has a strong ideological tilt, it's also useful to remember that he wrote that quite a long time ago now, when that effectively =was= true. Going back to the subject at hand, I think that the post misses the point that being a 'hacker' isn't really about how many languages you know, it's about certain ways of thinking. The most important, IMO, things to know are all (fairly) language agnostic - algorithms and data structures. If you don't understand those and how they work and how to choose between them, then you're never going to be really good at what you do. Also, you need to learn a functional language well enough that you can solve hard problems using it. Understanding functional programming and all the concepts it introduces (partial evaluation, currying, monads, first class functions, map/reduce to name a few) will do wonders for how you write code in other languages and will make the code you write far cleaner and more readable and easier to extend afterwards.