A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and
quickly. Not all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are.
Productivity can vary from one programmer to another by three
orders of magnitude. For example, one programmer might be
able to write an average of three lines of working code in one
day, while another, with the proper tools, might be able to
write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is matched in very
few other areas of human endeavour.
The term "superprogrammer" is more commonly used within such
places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to
stress naive measures of productivity and to underweight
creativity, ingenuity, and getting the job *done* - and to
sidestep the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do
more or less useful work than three lines that do the
RightThing. Hackers tend to prefer the terms
hacker and