Yea, I remember reading that article a week or two ago and being equally annoyed at times. I like to consider myself a competent programmer, but I'm obviously not a "good hacker" because I think Perl syntax is retarded and certainly not something I'd actively choose to code in. And preferring to work with Windows must make me deluded. I could make some crack about the only way that "they" could get people to want to work with UNIX was to rename it and give it away, but that wouldn't be nice. Blah, it's pretty obvious that the author has been drinking the open-source/Slashdot Kool-Aid.
Parts were on spot though and overall it was interesting provided one could ignore the religous fervor about open-source and operating systems.
Well, basically there is nothing wrong with fixing annoying you bug in Linux core API and rebuilding the system, that's routine operation on Linux actually. I don't work with Linux for several years, but before it was this way - you could (and should) update core sources whenever new rpm comes and rebuild for your configuration and taste.
I recently read Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham, the author of the article in question. I must say that I found myself very annoyed at many points in the book. I managed to make it thru however just on the many interesting ideas that were also mixed in.
I still havn't figured out if I would recommend the book to anyone. On one hand it's full of so much of the "open-source/Slashdot Kool-Aid" that Kenneth so aptly describes. On the other, it made me sit and thing about things in some interesting ways.
I honestly think that the book could have been great if he could just get over himself and realize that thousands of "hackers" don't think that open-source is the only way and that Lisp or some variant of Lisp is the only language worth programming in. Or maybe he just needs an good editor to show him the way. Just changing some of the "facts" that he presents as "opinions" would have raised my enjoyment enormously.