The New Hacker's Dictionary

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barfulation /bar`fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj.

Variation of [1127]barf used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?"

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barfulous /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj.

(alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.

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barn n.

[uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly large quantity of something: a unit of measurement. "Why is /var/adm taking up so much space?" "The logs have grown to several barns." The source of this is clear: when physicists were first studying nuclear interactions, the probability was thought to be proportional to the cross-sectional area of the nucleus (this probability is still called the cross-section). Upon experimenting, they discovered the interactions were far more probable than expected; the nuclei were `as big as a barn'. The units for cross-sections were christened Barns, (10^-24 cm^2) and the book containing cross-sections has a picture of a barn on the cover.

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barney n.

In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to [1137]fred (sense #1) as [1138]bar is to [1139]foo. That is, people who commonly use `fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use `barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.

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baroque adj.

[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of [1143]elephantine or [1144]monstrosity but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now that is baroque!" See also [1145]rococo.

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BASIC /bay'-sic/ n.

A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that

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"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like [1149]Pascal) of the cascading [1150]lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.

[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascaland C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]

Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a [1151]backronym. BASIC was originally named Basic, simply because it was a simple and basic programming language. Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms, BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is the one that caught on.

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batbelt n.

Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers, cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from their belts.

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baz /baz/ n.

1. [common] The third [1173]metasyntactic variable "Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ...." (See also [1174]fum) 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3. Occasionally appended to [1175]foo to produce `foobaz'.

Earlier versions of this lexicon derived `baz' as a Stanford corruption of [1176]bar. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the [1177]TMRC lexicon) reports it was already current when he joined TMRC in 1958. He says "It came from "Pogo". Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged, would shout `Bazz Fazz!' or `Rowrbazzle!' The club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England counties of Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with (Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)."

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bazaar n.,adj.

In 1997, after meditatating on the success of [1181]Linux for three years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and development models titled [1182]The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was that [1183]Brooks's Law is not the whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor caught on (see also [1184]cathedral), and the style of development typical in the Linux community is now often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer reviewers.

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bboard /bee'bord/ n.

[contraction of `bulletin board'] 1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of [1188]BBS systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet [1189]newsgroup (in fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as a [1190]newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet). 2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards. 3. The term `physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge.

In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".

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BBS /B-B-S/ n.

[common; abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into [1194]topic groups. The term was especially applied to the thousands of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they

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served a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a certain flavor has been lost. See also [1195]bboard.

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BCPL // n.

[abbreviation, `Basic Combined Programming Language') A programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in 1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the language in which the original [1199]hello world program was written. It has been ported to so many different systems that its creator confesses to having lost count. It has only one data type (a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost anything else, depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C, which inherited some of its features.

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beam vt.

[from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] 1. To transfer [1203]softcopy of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as `beam me a copy' or `beam that over to his site'. 2. Palm Pilot users very commonly use this term for the act of exchanging bits via the infrared links on their machines (this term seems to have originated with the ill-fated Newton Message Pad). Compare [1204]blast, [1205]snarf, [1206]BLT.

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beanie key n.

[Mac users] See [1210]command key.

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beep n.,v.

Syn. [1214]feep. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS and OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among micro hobbyists.

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Node:Befunge, Next:[1215]beige toaster, Previous:[1216]beep, Up:[1217]= B =

Befunge n.

A worthy companion to [1218]INTERCAL; a computer language family which escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow and embraces program counters flying through multiple dimensions with exotic topologies. Sadly, the Befunge home page has vanished, but a Befunge version of the [1219]hello world program is at [1220]http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge.html.

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