1. wannabee
(also, more plausibly, spelled wannabe) [from a term recently used to describe
Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob.: originally
from biker slang] A would-be hacker. The
connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure
of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering
larval stage, it is semi-approving; such wannabees
can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such
creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer,
or suit, it is derogatory, implying that said person
is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally,
have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from
this lexicon is often an indication of the wannabee
nature. Compare newbie.Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different
flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people
who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in larval
stage, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious
and unaffected by models known in popular culture — communities
formed spontaneously around people who, as
individuals, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and
what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to
become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever;
society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included
the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is
that some people semi-consciously set out to be
hackers and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image
of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually
become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly
articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them
mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this
one.
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Definitions of wannabee 
