I don't want to start a war but I'd say that this list is about the differences between a Windows VS Linux developer. The thing behind what is said is "get your eyes off of the nice UI. Look and type code".
Uses the tools listed in the article on windows. (well, windows equivalents anyhow)
I think the message was more of "Know your tools, know them well. Know them, and what they are capable of so that you may wield them to their fullest potential". For software, this involves reading the source when it's available.
Could that be because you exclude Windows hackers from your definition of "hacker"?
I know some folks on the Google Toolbar team. I don't use Toolbar, and neither do any of my friends. It's desktop software, and desktop software for Windows, so I mostly ignore it.
But their installed base is huge. I'd wager that if you added up the combined user base of every Web2.0 startup mentioned on this site, you still wouldn't equal the number of Google Toolbar users worldwide. Are they still hackers?
Could that be because you exclude Windows hackers from your definition of "hacker"?
No, it couldn't. The person out of the group of people that I know personally that I consider "hackers" uses Windows primarily, and knows a bunch of crazy APIs inside and out. He does whip out VS for some stuff, but the vast majority of his code is written in emacs.
I'm not saying the article is right all the time, but I think it's a pretty good rule-of-thumb.
My experience coinciding with the article is more of a function of "I really don't know very many people" than "I don't think there can be such a thing as a hacker that uses windows, or microsoft tools".
It was a genuinely better browser than the competition. The problem isn't that IE6 wasn't a good browser - it's that IE6 was a great browser in 2001. But in 2009 - it's not really up to scratch.
How do you define "great hackers" then? If you go with the ESR "A great hacker is someone who other great hackers consider a hacker" definition, you get a very inbred, circle-jerk culture. (Which seems to have happened in various corners of the free software world, BTW.) Of course a great hacker would use the same tools as you then...that's how you know they're a great hacker, after all. ;-)
Other metrics like "A great hacker is someone who writes lots of code" are equally ludicrous, because then only Java and Cobol programmers end up as great hackers since those languages are so much more verbose than everything else. ;-)
The benefits of knowing your tools extend even beyond your personal productivity. Such knowledge often presents opportunities to save the hides of other individuals.
For instance, I'm in a very, very large company (anyone in law, science, or journalism has used our products). I recently saw three separate requests for ~80 hours and $7000 of contractor time each to manually add serialVersionUIDs to serializable Java classes.
Eclipse, which we're paying* IBM to use, has a nice code refactoring tool that makes the entire process three clicks and about 30 minutes of twiddling your thumbs. I saved one and a half months of FTE time, and $20,000 by simply knowing what the tools we were already paying for could do.
*Yes, I'm aware that Eclipse is Free Software; we're using IBM's rebranded Rational Application Developer. Yes, I'd rather use Eclipse and Tomcat instead of RAD and WAS. No, I'm not bitter.
The thing behind what is said is "get your eyes off of the nice UI. Look and type code".
Hmmm. I'm currently working a project targeting handheld devices written on the .NET Framework, meaning I'm using Visual Studio. Currently, my IDE looks a whole lot like an instance of Vim or TextMate--no widgets outside of the top level menu displayed, and I typically use keyboard shortcuts for builds, navigating, etc, etc.
