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Hacking is a term used both by those who write code and those who exploit it. Even though these two groups of hackers have different end goals, both groups use similar problem-solving techniques. And because an understanding of programming helps those who exploit, and an understanding of exploitation helps those who program, many hackers do both. There are interesting hacks found in both the techniques used to write elegant code and the techniques used to exploit programs. Hacking is really just the act of finding a clever and counterintuitive solution to a problem.
The hacks found in program exploits usually deal with using the rules of the computer in ways never intended, to achieve seemingly magical results, which are usually focused on bypassing security. The hacks found in the writing of programs are similar, in that they also use the rules of the computer in new and inventive ways, but the final goal tends to be achieving the most impressive and best possible way to accomplish a given task. There is actually an infinite number of programs that can be written to accomplish any given task, but most of these solutions are unnecessarily large, complex, and sloppy. The few solutions that remain are small, efficient, and neat. This particular quality of a program is called elegance, and the clever and inventive solutions that tend to lead to this efficiency are called hacks. Hackers on both sides of programming tend to appreciate both the beauty of elegant code and the ingenuity of clever hacks.
Because of the sudden growth of computational power and the temporary dot-com economic bubble, less importance has been put on clever hacks and elegant code, and more importance has been placed on churning out functional code as quickly and cheaply as possible. Spending an extra five hours to create a slightly faster and more memory-efficient piece of code just doesn't make business sense when that increase in speed and memory only turns out to be a few milliseconds on modern consumer processors and less than a single percent of savings in the hundreds of millions of bytes of memory most modern computers have available. When the bottom line is money, spending time on clever hacks for optimization just doesn't make sense.
True appreciation of programming elegance is left for the hackers: computer hobbyists whose end goal isn't to make a profit, but just to squeeze every bit of functionality out of their old Commodore 64 that they possibly can; exploit writers who need to write tiny and amazing pieces of code to slip through narrow security cracks; and anyone else who appreciates the pursuit and the challenge of finding the best possible solution. These are the people who get excited about programming and really appreciate the beauty of an elegant piece of code or the ingenuity of a clever hack. Because an understanding of programming is a prerequisite to understanding how programs can be exploited, programming makes a natural starting point.
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