Okay, there are some gigantic generalizations being made here, both in this post and others. I'm currently a senior at a liberal arts school, majoring in CS. Of

Okay, there are some gigantic generalizations being made here, both in this post and others. I'm currently a senior at a liberal arts school, majoring in CS. Of the 10 or so CS majors in my class, I'd say half are also "hackers" in that they spend significant free time programming outside of class, for work and for fun. All of these people know at least one of {Ruby,Javascript} (Ruby happens to be less popular around here than Python since the latter is taught in intro classes). Not coincidentally, these people are also at the top of the department and are having the most success applying to grad school AND jobs. I guess my point is that the hacker/academic distinction is not necessarily as broad as one would think reading some of these comments, and that many of us CS types think of ourselves as hackers as well as academics.