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SimpyJargon Lexicon
Search the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
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Meat for the hacker's diet
The Jargon File is great by itself, but it also has plenty of references to invaluable resources, born from the quintessence of the hacker community. For your convenience we have compiled the list of all books that have been mentioned throughout the Jargon File. Here's a random example:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Hal Abelson, Jerry Sussman and Julie Sussman; MIT Press, 1984, 1996; ISBN 0-262-01153-0.
This book has had a dramatic impact on computer science curricula over the past decade. This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text.
There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published.
A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises.
In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.
This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Wizard Book.
Random terms
SCNR
SCNR abbrev
[common] Sorry, Could Not Resist. Normally used to semi-apologize for an obvious wisecrack.
open
open n.
Abbreviation for ‘open (or left) parenthesis’ — used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: “Open defun foo, open eks close, open, plus eks one, close close.”
recompile the world
recompile the world
The surprisingly large amount of work that needs to be done as the result of any small but globally visible program change. “The world” may mean the entirety of some huge program, or may in theory refer to every program of a certain class in the entire known universe. For instance, “Add one #define to stdio.h, and you have to recompile the world.” This means that any minor change to the standard-I/O header file theoretically mandates recompiling every C program in existence, even if only to verify that the change didn't screw something else up. In practice, you may not actually have to recompile the world, but the implication is that some human cleverness is required to figure out what parts can be safely left out.
