Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKoVsHs_Ko
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.