I posted the following comment on why’s seminal manifesto posted last month at hackety org:
Hacking for hack’s sake means not being satisfied with the tools you’re given and the rules you’re given. Hacking for hack’s sake means that if you want do perform a task from the command line or Quicksilver or a bookmarklet or a microcontroller installed inside a teddy bear entrusted to a small child, the only thing stopping you is your own creativity. Hacking for hack’s sake means making your electronic ecosystem entirely your own. Hacking for hack’s sake means five-line wikis, thirty-line wikis, wikis in your text editor, wikis on your iPhone, wikis snuck into the office during the dead of night. Hacking for hack’s sake means Vim bindings for Firefox. Hacking for hack’s sake means never doing anything by hand more than twice before you write a script to do it for you. Hacking for hack’s sake means the only unit test you run says @assert hacker.satisfied?@ and it never, ever passes.