On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Charles Haynes > <[email protected]> wrote: >> of hack. ESR's editing of the Jargon File is better. > > The canonical location of course is, http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html
Actually the canonical location is jargon.txt on mit-ai (at least that's where I first saw it, and I don't think there are any earlier incarnations. There was a version at SAIL as well but even though I was in Palo Alto during that era my connections were more at MIT.) > Hacks and Jugaads are close relatives, but they are IMO not the same. > The "hack" in the jargon file sense evolved in rich western societies > where the hacker uses his knowledge and skills to gain him more free > time in which to laze[0] rather than actually solve the problem in a > proper (and often lengthy or boring) manner. I think that's a mischaracterization of "hack." There are three main flavors of hack, the most common being "a quick hack" or "I'll hack around it" which is to say a solution born of necessity, either due to lack of time, arbitrary restrictions, or indeed lack of resources. Hacks are not a way to get more free time, they're a way to get more time to hack! > However, it's also a > celebration of intellect and so one can go to extreme lengths to > effect an elaborate hack, so much so the conventional route may have > been faster. > > The jugaad evolved in poverty, where the jugaadu tries to outwit the > system that keeps him poor, servile or otherwise impotent. Evolving as > they did at opposite ends of the economic development scale, hacks and > jugaads are applied to rather different world problems. A jugaadu > would not adopt a jugaad where a proper "pucca" solution is available, > because the jugaad recognizes the jugaad to be an inferior fix. A > jugaadu is rather flexible ethically; for example, paying a bribe to > get an illegal electricity connection is a "jugaad", whereas I don't > think this would be conventionally termed a "hack". > Jugaad is the wile of the poor, and hack the pastime of the cerebral. So a Jugaad is a hack to get around or deal with a lack of or limited resources, and has a class component to it - jugaad are things poor but clever people do to make the most of the resources they have. They do what they need to do, without regard to what is supposed to be possible. Nice. On the other hand, it sounds like appropriation of the term "jugaad" by rich multinational corporations to describe some supposedly unique Indian corporate mindset enabling white collar solutions to foreign problems is a more than a little smug. -- Charles
