
Hacker Koan - manojkr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan
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PVerhagen
I wrote this Koan a while back. It amused /r/ruby:

When Matsumoto first came to these shores, he met a precocious young hacker
who was strong in the way of Perl, which had many practitioners then.

“Matsumoto,” the young man said, “why should I learn your foreign Ruby? I am
strong in the way of Perl, and I have yet to find a problem it is not flexible
enough to solve.”

Matsumoto smiled his kind smile and said, “One does not learn Ruby for
oneself. One learns Ruby for others.”

“Ha,” the young man said, “then your way is not for me. I am not the
cooperating type. I work on my own projects and my projects alone. No one but
me reads my code.”

Matsumoto bowed his head and said, “All hackers cooperate, even you.”

“You are a fool, Matsumoto! Did I not just say I work alone?”

To this Matsumoto said, “Even those who work alone, cooperate with all the
people they once were and all those they will become.”

Upon hearing this, the young man was enlightened.

~~~
SlyShy
Excellent!

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sigvef
My favorite hacker koans are the vim koans: [http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/vim-
koans/](http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/vim-koans/)

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ZenoArrow
This one makes no sense... "A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine
by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing,
spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no
understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked."

~~~
zengargoyle
Knight knew enough to leave the machine off long enough for the capacitors to
discharge so the machine started from a clean slate. The Novice was turning
the machine back on too soon.

~~~
ZenoArrow
There's no mention of extra time between the off and on state.

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vezzy-fnord
Also essential is the seminal work _The Tao of Programming_ , which is the
first that assembled hacker koans into a published physical form, if I'm not
mistaken.

