{"id":30037,"date":"2016-08-22T01:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T05:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30037"},"modified":"2018-09-18T14:36:55","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T18:36:55","slug":"qotd-terry-pratchett-and-the-hacker-mentality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/08\/22\/qotd-terry-pratchett-and-the-hacker-mentality\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Terry Pratchett and the hacker mentality"},"content":{"rendered":"

I learned something this weekend about the high cost of the subtle delusion that creative technical problem-solving is the preserve of a priesthood of experts, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of ordinary human beings.<\/p>\n

Terry Pratchett is the author of the Discworld<\/em> series of satirical fantasies. He is \u2014 and I don\u2019t say this lightly, or without having given the matter thought and study \u2014 quite probably the most consistently excellent writer of intelligent humor in the last century in English. One has to go back as far as P.G. Wodehouse or Mark Twain to find an obvious equal in consistent quality, volume, and sly wisdom.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been a fan of Terry\u2019s since before his first Discworld novel; I\u2019m one of the few people who remembers Strata<\/em>, his 1981 first experiment with the disc-world concept. The man has been something like a long-term acquaintance of mine for ten years \u2014 one of those people you\u2019d like to call a friend, and who you think would like to call you a friend, if the two of you ever arranged enough concentrated hang time to get that close. But we\u2019re both damn busy people, and live five thousand miles apart.<\/p>\n

This weekend, Terry and I were both guests of honor at a hybrid SF convention and Linux conference called Penguicon held in Warren, Michigan. We finally got our hang time. Among other things, I taught Terry how to shoot pistols. He loves shooter games, but as a British resident his opportunities to play with real firearms are strictly limited. (I can report that Terry handled my .45 semi with remarkable competence and steadiness for a first-timer. I can also report that this surprised me not at all.)<\/p>\n

During Terry\u2019s Guest-of-Honor speech, he revealed his past as (he thought) a failed hacker. It turns out that back in the 1970s Terry used to wire up elaborate computerized gadgets from Timex Sinclair computers. One of his projects used a primitive memory chip that had light-sensitive gates to build a sort of perceptron that could actually see the difference between a circle and a cross. His magnum opus was a weather station that would log readings of temperature and barometric pressure overnight and deliver weather reports through a voice synthesizer.<\/p>\n

But the most astonishing part of the speech was the followup in which Terry told us that despite his keen interest and elaborate homebrewing, he didn\u2019t become a programmer or a hardware tech because he thought techies had to know mathematics, which he thought he had no talent for. He then revealed that he thought of his projects as a sort of bad imitation of programming, because his hardware and software designs were total lash-ups and he never really knew what he was doing.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t stand it. \u201cAnd you think it was any different for us?<\/em>\u201d I called out. The audience laughed and Terry passed off the remark with a quip. But I was just boggled. Because I know that almost all<\/em> really bright techies start out that way, as compulsive tinkerers who blundered around learning by experience before they acquired systematic knowledge. \u201cOh ye gods and little fishes\u201d, I thought to myself, \u201cTerry is a hacker!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, I thought \u2018is\u2019 \u2014 even if Terry hasn\u2019t actually tinkered any computer software or hardware in a quarter-century. Being a hacker is expressed through skills and projects, but it\u2019s really a kind of attitude or mental stance that, once acquired, is never really lost. It\u2019s a kind of intense, omnivorous playfulness that tends to color everything a person does.<\/p>\n

So it burst upon me that Terry Pratchett has the hacker nature. Which, actually, explains something that has mildly puzzled me for years. Terry has a huge following in the hacker community \u2014 knowing his books is something close to basic cultural literacy for Internet geeks. One is actually hard-put to think of any other writer for whom this is as true. The question this has always raised for me is: why Terry, rather than some hard-SF writer whose work explicitly celebrates the technologies we play with?<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “The Delusion of Expertise”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2003-05-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I learned something this weekend about the high cost of the subtle delusion that creative technical problem-solving is the preserve of a priesthood of experts, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of ordinary human beings. Terry Pratchett is the author of the Discworld series of satirical fantasies. He is \u2014 and I don\u2019t say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,41,15],"tags":[109,1235,49,129,85,632],"class_list":["post-30037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-esr","tag-guns","tag-hack","tag-sf","tag-terrypratchett"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Ot","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30038,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30037\/revisions\/30038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}