The New Hackers Dictionary | Page 9

the earth".
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy.
Daniel Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances:
the "physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the
"design stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the
"intentional stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires and
intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of truth but of
utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from the design stance,
but more complex ones are modelled using the intentional stance.
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Node:Comparatives, Previous:[113]Anthropomorphization,
Up:[114]Jargon Construction
Comparatives
Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood
as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the
adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality
of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum:
monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature crock kluge hack
win feature elegance perfection
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:
broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle solid robust bulletproof armor-plated
Note, however, that `dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is
rare in the U.S.) and may change places with `flaky' for some speakers.
Coinages for describing [115]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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Node:Hacker Writing Style, Next:[116]Email Quotes,
Previous:[117]Jargon Construction, Up:[118]Top
Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing
grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for
form-versus-content 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.
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 programming,
American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When
communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra
characters can be a real pain in the neck.
Consider, for example, a sentence in a [119]vi tutorial that looks like
this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".
Standard usage would make this
Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."
but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to type
the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1) dot repeats the last
command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!
The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.
Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain,
though the older style (which became established for typographical
reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in
typeset text) is still accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford
Dictionary for Writers and Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or
`logical' quoting. This returns British English to the style Latin
languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan) have been using
all along.
Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between `scare'
quotes and `speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for
marking and reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of
speech or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities
describe this as correct general usage, but mainstream American
English has gone to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that

hacker usage appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal
quirk of mine until I checked with Usenet --ESR]. One further
permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish tendency to do
marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs; that is,
'like this'. This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in
some programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many
character-only terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a
vertical single quote).
One quirk that shows