I have no other reply to this essay. I am unmoved by anybody who requires social cues in order to decide how to spend time. When I got heavily into programming, nobody I knew had the faintest idea of what it was or what I was doing. I couldn’t be bothered, because I was too busy programming.
> When I got heavily into programming, nobody I knew had the faintest idea of what it was or what I was doing. I couldn’t be bothered, because I was too busy programming.
That's certainly typical for fledging hackers in 'larval stage', but many people would disagree that this suffices for calling oneself a hacker as a non-novice professional. Some contact, if perhaps only fleeting, with a community of fellow coders and tinkerers would seem to be required for that.
There's plenty of informal social support within the hacker community - that's what makes it a community of practice in the first place! The very fact that, traditionally, you become a hacker when someone in the community calls you a hacker is testament to that.
Well yea people who feel part of that community would. I don't call myself a hacker either but I was modifying hardware and software in my teens for fun so I probably counted as one. I didn't know of any hacker community. It was just a fascinating thing to do. However, I also don't blame anyone for not supporting me, despite the fact that they didn't. No adults around me even understood what I was doing. One teacher told me off for programming in the computer room instead of sitting quietly or whatever dumb time-killer she had planned. But that was no obstacle whatsoever. The fact that this author was put off by a grade in a school project shows how un-self-motivated she was.