Shakesphacker: (n.) a programer who, at the instar of Shakespeare's infamous chimps, randomly bang on the keyboard until the laws of probability make him generate a working line of code.
I came up with that term Friday to try to put a label on a coding philosophy I observed. I'm not entierely satisfied by it though -- it sounds way too sophisticated for the kind of feeling it try to convey. "Foo flinger" could be more adequate.
In all cases, shakesphackers can be easily identified by their exuberant love of evals -- they firmly believe that, just like violence, if it doesn't solve your problems, it's because your not using enough of it.
My first thought was that you were going to define the word as people who butcher Shakespeare by using l33tspeak.
Re:Sh4kesphack3rs
Yanick on 2007-07-25T02:41:29
My first thought was that you were going to define the word as people who butcher Shakespeare by using l33tspeak.Thanks. That was the most enjoyable perversion of the Bard's work I saw since Tromeo and Juliet.
they firmly believe that, just like violence, if it doesn't solve your problems, it's because your not using enough of it. This applies to more things than just eval. Object orientation, indirection, and regular expressions are other examples that spring to mind.:-) Agreed, although two of them are not current issues for me. Mentioning OO to the shakesphackers I'm dealing with at the moment only leave them slack-jawed and bovine-eyed, and they only use baby-regexp speak (not that they have a choice, mind you, considering that we are using TCL). Indirection is something that do cause problems, like interpolation, and namespaces, and... oh, too much stuff to cover here.
:-)
