I particularly enjoyed the entry on Tail Recursion.
I imagine a modern version would have an entry for Tail-Call Optimization that used history.replaceState().
The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
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Re: The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
#22I'm more interested in what a modern jargon file would look like. (Don't even dare mention Raymonds version.) It's obvious to me that if you were to start today, it would make the most sense to start from scratch. You could probably even find them automatically with a script that searches for non-dictionary words. Any that show up often enough could be considered for entry into the new file. [0]
The main issue would be figuring out what counts as a hacker community, and what communities to grab words from.
[0]: Of course, this wouldn't catch words that have been re-purposed from their standard dictionary usage.
Re: The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
#23I stumbled upon the last printed edition of this (ESR's version) at a bookstore in high school. I had dabbled with programming on and off since elementary school (back when that was unusual!), but now I was seriously getting into it.
While almost none of the terms in the book resonated with me as anything I had heard before, I strongly identified with the cultural aspects described in the book. I suddenly felt like my ways of thinking about computing, and about the world in general, were in fact not that strange, but shared by a lot of people who were into programming.
The book introduced me to many things that I went on to become more involved with; at least indirectly due to the book: learned LaTeX, Emacs, and Lisp; studied Knuth, reading carefully until I earned a check; volunteered for GNU, resulting in working directly with RMS.
As a technical resource, the book is close to useless now. But it was mostly useless when I encountered it. Maybe there's still some value left in it somewhere...
Re: The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site maintainer for the 1988 verion, Paul Dourish, gives a counterargument in his preface ('...Unfortunately, in the process, [Raymond] essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly…
I'm torn, because while ESR did add a lot of emphasis on Unix/C culture (which is very important in hacker history), the last five or ten years he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.
...he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.
And terms of his own devising that haven't caught on. That seems like the cardinal sin of a lexicographer.
Re: The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
#25The peculiar nouns "-osity" thing was not originally a hacker thing. Discounting other unnecessary word endings being introduced to the public at large by the Fonz in Happy Days when he continually added the "-omundo" to the end of things, the "-osity" type of adjective -> noun mutilation may have been picked up from surfer/Cali talk, introduced into the mainstream by movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Spic…
"crash" and "down" go back further than that. I'm looking at my copy of HoToGAMIT ("How to Get Around MIT") from 1972. In the Appendix there is a Lexicon of MIT Words, Phrases, Acronyms. The entry for "crash": "(1) To sleep in a place where one has not paid rent, such as a friend's apartment. (2) To join a party without being invited. (3) To cease functioning, as in a computer system." And the entry for "down": "(1)…
Nice! Was just talking about my own personal experience. I'm sure that people that delt with mainframes talked about them being "down" when terminals weren't working. In the mid 90s I remember talking with my parents and them not knowing what a server was, but by ~2001 my dad at least probably knew about a website being "down".