My experience is that a good programmer can write clean, structured, readable, and easy-to-maintain code in almost any language (including assembly language).
On the other hand, a "hacker" can somehow manage to produce unintelligible spaghetti code in any language.

This I definitely agree with. What separates languages is rather how much you have to fight the language in order to make its code readable, structured and easy to maintain. Some languages make such a structure relatively natural also for a beginner, whereas other languages requires you to yourself come up with a methodology that is structured, often through trial and error or previous experience with other languages.
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Griatch

Thank you all for your answers to my questions.

Interesting topic, I have been following with interest.Today this arrived in my inmail (yes, I subscribe to "How-To Geek" )
http://www.howtogeek.com/news/diagram-o ... phic/5354/

I thought that image was so neat I downloaded it so I could put it in here.

You might be a computer geek if....

You create your daily todo list, as a flow chart!

Flow charts are so 70's!

The ultimate geek figures out a way to make computers do all the work (i.e., everything is automated). Some may think them to be lazy, but others know that it pays to think smarter and not harder.

... you have an answer to this question without thinking.

If your laptop dies and you move your desktop computer into your bedroom and set your monitor on your bed so you have your nightly surf.

Yes, and this leads to the "miserable programmer paradox"

Sounds like even programmers must practice tao (yin/yang or balance. Too much easy or too much hard is annoying). lol

Some of the comments were very interesting and quite true for me.

I eventually realized that my job really was to figure out the stuff that nobody else could figure out. That meant a lot of daily interruptions... and frustration at not doing the work that I really wanted to do... at least not during normal business hours.

thats funny