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responses to a single followup group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause followup articles to go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to only one part of the original posting. |
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crudware /kruhd'weir/ n. Pejorative term for the hundreds of megabytes of low-quality freeware circulated by user's groups and BBS systems in the micro-hobbyist world. "Yet another set of disk catalog utilities for MS-DOS? What crudware!" |
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cruft /kruhft/ [back-formation from crufty] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from hand cruft, pun on 'hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see hand-hacking). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code. 5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers". |
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cruft together vt. (also cruft up) To throw together something ugly but temporarily workable. Like vt. kluge up, but more pejorative. "There isn't any program now to reverse all the lines of a file, but I can probably cruft one together in about 10 minutes." See hack together, hack up, kluge up, crufty. |
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cruftsmanship /kruhfts'm n-ship / n. [from cruft] The antithesis of crafts-manship. |
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crufty /kruhf'tee/ adj. [origin unknown; poss. from 'crusty' or 'cruddy'] 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The canonical example is "This is standard old crufty DEC software". In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin of crufty holds that was originally a mutation of 'crusty' applied to DEC software so old that the 's' characters were tall and skinny, looking more like 'f' characters. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup. 3. Generally unpleasant. 4. (sometimes spelled cruftie) n. A small crufty object (see frob); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store crufties (or, collectively, random cruft)." |
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This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows |
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