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and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum: |
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monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature
crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection |
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The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never actually attained. Another similar scale is used for describing the reliability of software: |
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broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle
solid robust bulletproof armor-plated |
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Note, however, that 'dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is rare in the U.S.) and may change places with 'flaky' for some speakers. |
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Coinages for describing lossage seem to call forth the very finest in hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people. |
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We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versuscontent language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells 'wrong' as 'worng'. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to confusion or things that are confusing; 'dain bramage' for 'brain damage' is perhaps the most common (similarly, a hacker would be likely to write ''Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned. |
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Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of pro |
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