Steven Levy, Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution…
“ Sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho contest to prove oneself so much in command of the system that one could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new algorithm which would save a whole block of instructions. (An algorithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve a complex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton key.) ”
