The very first line of any knitting pattern looks something like this, “Cast on 24 stitches.” And that means to create that initial row of loops on the needle. Well I looked at that and my brain immediately recognized well that’s just a for loop.
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I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that many of us here today like to see our work as a continuation of say the Tech Model Railroad Club or the Homebrew Computer Club, and certainly the terminology and the values of this conference, like open source for example, have their roots in that era. As a consequence it’s easy to interpret any criticism of the hacker ethic—which is what I’m about to do—as a kind of assault.