[zozbot234]

> 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.