- I’ve heard people saying that “hardware programming tends to be hackish” and I believe that they mean that they have to solve problems when they have to get really creative and employ many tricks to solve certain problems because there’s not one “good” or “proper” way of solving a problem, which is the nature of hardware programming. When someone says a programming language or platform “has good official support” or “is easy to work with,” they are meaning the opposite of “hackish” because they can accomplish what they want neatly by simply following the official documentation or what is considered the “best practice.”
hackish
derivation affixation; adjective
having to often rely on one’s own creativity when solving a (technological) problem due to a lack of officially prescribed or widely known approaches
Etymology : verb/noun “hack” + adjectival word-forming element “-ish” meaning “of the nature or character of”
Source : I first heard of the term in a CS student organization sometime in late 2019. Then, Dr. Kemmer caught myself using it during office hours in Oct 2020: it was a discussion about technology, and I said something like “There are only hackish ways” when solving a problem. Etymonline entry of “-ish” Oxford Dictionary entry of “hack”
Last modified: 26 November 2020