The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (ebook reader android txt) 📕

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Spoken inarticulations

Words such as mumble',sigh', and `groan' are spoken in places where

their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested

that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such

noises on a comm link or in electronic mail, MUDs, and IRC channels

(interestingly, the same sorts of constructions have been showing up

with increasing frequency in comic strips). Another expression

sometimes heard is "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!"

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Anthropomorphization

Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish

tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists

and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for

anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of

behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most

hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program

behavior in terms of wants and desires.

Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though

it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and

desires. Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that

programs "are trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that

"its goal in life is to X". One even hears explanations like "... and

its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died." Sometimes

modelling things this way actually seems to make them easier to

understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of

anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as `like a

person' rather than `like a thing'.

At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually

work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people

who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would

use language that seemds to ascribe conciousness to them. The mind-set

behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a

naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of

feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the

things they work on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers

who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program

behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.

Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic

ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the

minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are

biological machines - consciousness is an interesting and valuable

epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not

fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from

computers.

Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference

between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon

and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a

thing `alive', is information and richness of pattern. This is animism

from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins

and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of

`consciousness' according to their information-processing capacity.

Because hackers accept a that a human machine can have intentions, it

is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to

complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is

mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that "The program

wants to go into an infinite loop" than it is to say that "I want to

go eat some chocolate" - and even defensible to say that "The stone,

once dropped, wants to move towards the center of 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.

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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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' asworng'. 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' forbrain 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' orlogical' 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 up frequently in the [120]email style of Unix

hackers in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally

all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C

routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the

beginning of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case

of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation

(the `spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an

appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and

confusing them can lead to [121]lossage). A way of escaping this

dilemma is simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning

of sentences.

There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to

the effect that precision of expression is more important than

conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or

lose information they can be discarded without a second thought. It is

notable in this respect that other hackish inventions (for example, in

vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise shades of meaning even

when constructed to appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker, the

contrast between loose' form andtight' content in jargon is a

substantial part of its humor!

Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis

conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and

these are occasionally carried over into written documents even when

normal means of font changes, underlining, and the like are available.

One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS `LOUD', and

this becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who

goes to caps-lock while in [122]talk mode may be asked to "stop

shouting, please, you're hurting my ears!".

Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to

signify emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the

hell?" even though this interferes with the common use of the

asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The underscore is also common,

suggesting underlining (this is particularly common with book titles;

for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote

---The---Forever---War--- as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's earlier novel of

the future military, ---Starship---Troopers---."). Other forms exemplified

by "=hell=", "hell/", or "/hell/" are occasionally seen (it's claimed

that in the last example the first slash pushes the letters over to

the right to make them italic, and the second keeps them from falling

over). On FidoNet, you might see #bright# and ^dark^ text, which was

actually interpreted by some reader software. Finally, words may also

be emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under them

on the next line of the text.

There is a semantic difference between emphasis like this (which

emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and emphasis like this (which

suggests the writer speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a

very young child or a mentally impaired person). Bracketing a word

with the `*' character may also indicate that the writer wishes

readers to consider that an action is taking place or that a sound is

being made. Examples: bang, hic, ring, grin, kick, stomp,

mumble.

One might also see the above sound effects as , , ,

, , , . This use of angle brackets to mark

their contents originally derives from conventions used in [123]BNF,

but since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on

the World Wide Web.

Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands

for some [124]random member of