imho, hacking is the process of writing spaghetti code (i.e. no use of structured programming methodolgy)<homer>"mmmm...spaghetti...."</homer>. This can be a useful skill, akin to someone who can give a pretty good speech in front of a room full of people with no preparation. Point is, if the person HAD prepared, their speech would likely have been better than a person's speech who had less natural talent, but who had prepared. I guess that's why the syntactically forgiving perl is so popular with these folks.

Some people need heros & legends.