[mpalmer]

I would think that quite a few powerful new ideas have come purely from abusing and bashing around older ideas.

[dylan604]

It is pretty much the entire hacker ethos. "I have this thing that does something but not what I need, but with some tinkering it now does what I need" or even "I have this thing, but I'm just going to see what else I can make it do whether it is useful or not but solely because I can"

[gblargg]

Probably writing itself was originally a hack.