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pretty up these disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure that everyone's sacred cows get gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent viewpoints is. |
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The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We have not felt it either necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too, contribute flavor, and one of this document's major intended audiences fledgling hackers already partway inside the culture will benefit from them. |
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A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in Appendix A, Hacker Folklore. The 'outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to Appendix B, A Portrait of J. Random Hacker. Appendix C, the Bibliography, lists some non-technical works which have either influenced or described the hacker culture. |
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Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the Jargon File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one will do likewise. |
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Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak |
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Linguists usually refer to informal language as 'slang' and reserve the term 'jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various occupations. However, the ancestor of this collection was called the 'Jargon File', and hacker slang is traditionally 'the jargon'. When talking about the jargon there is therefore no convenient way to distinguish it from what a linguist would call hackers' jargon the formal vocabulary they learn from textbooks, technical papers, and manuals. |
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To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker slang and the vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider technical culture of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize hackish slang. |
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Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of usage permit about the distinctions among three categories: |
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slang: informal language from mainstream English or non-technical subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc). |
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