Feb
3
“Writing clever (or sometimes ugly) code is also described as hacking. In this case the hacker is violating the rules of how we expect software to be written. If there’s a project that should take months to write, and someone manages to hack it out in a single evening, that’s a small miracle, and a major hack. If the result is simple and beautiful because the hacker discovered a better solution, we may describe the hack as “elegant” or “brilliant”. If the result is complex and hard to understand (perhaps it violates many layers of abstraction), then we will call it an “ugly hack”. Ugly hacks aren’t all bad though — one of my favorite personal hacks was some messy code that demonstrated what would become AdSense (story here[1]), and although the code was quickly discarded, it did it’s job.”
Paul Buchheit, Applied Philosophy a.k.a. ‘Hacking’
