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>"I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose...
by zck 15y ago
>"I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?"
It's a third sense of the word, meaning something like "put together without a plan, by trying things until they worked". When someone says "I hacked together this program", they mean "I threw code at it, and now it seems to do what I want".
- archgoon 15y agoRelated: "This is a bit of hack" to describe a solution that is very fragile and subject to breaking, or just ignores good practices. Technically, you could argue that this is in fact the original usage, as the solution's fragility typically is due to ignoring the conventional semantics and exploiting the actual underlying implementation of something.
- sequoia 15y agogood definition! You are right. To expand upon it: "not fully tested / MVP / not yet able to handle all possible cases"