Artifacts and Customs
The academic hacker subculture is defined by shared work and play focused around central artifacts. Some of these artifacts are very large; the Internet, the World Wide Web, GNU, and the Linux kernel are all hacker creations, works of which the subculture considers itself primary custodian.
The academic hacker subculture has developed a rich range of symbols that serve as recognition symbols and reinforce its group identity. GNU's Gnu; Beastie, the BSD Daemon; Tux, the Linux penguin; and the Perl Camel are some examples. The use of the glider structure from Conway's Game of Life as a general Hacker Emblem has been proposed by Eric S. Raymond.
The academic hacker subculture has an annual ceremonial day—April Fool's. There is a long tradition of perpetrating elaborate jokes, hoaxes, pranks and fake websites on this date, which includes the publication of the annual joke RFC.
Read more about this topic: Hacker (programmer Subculture)
Famous quotes containing the word customs:
“The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)