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when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave unless, of course, one's own unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed. |
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replicator n. Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see meme), a program (see quine, worm, wabbit, fork bomb, and virus), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see life, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or nanobot. It is even claimed by some that Unix and C are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator; see Unix conspiracy. |
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restriction n. A bug or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a feature. Often used (esp. by marketroid types) to make it sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false). |
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Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less flamage for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect. |
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retcon /ret'kon/ [short for 'retroactive continuity', from the Usenet news-group rec.arts.comics] 1. n. The common situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a new story 'reveals' things about events in previous stories, usually leaving the 'facts' the same (thus preserving continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon. 2. vt. To write such a story about a character or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable." "Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in ''The Empire Strikes Back". |
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[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word retcon |
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