Terms Software Engineers Should Know (1)
Published: 2022-01-21Recently, I bought (and started to read) a book The New Hacker’s Dictionary - 3rd Edition by Eric S. Raymond. I picked some expressions that I personally found useful or interesting from this book.
ABEND
ABEND or abend (/ˈæbɛnd/, /əˈbɛnd/) is the abbreviation for “ABnormal END”, i.e., “abnormal termination of software”. This just sounds good to me.
adger
Hacker’s Dictionary defines adger (/ˈædʒər/) as “to make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort”. This is really specific and useful.
AIDS
AIDS is short for “A* Infected Disk Syndrome”, where A* refers to Apple or Amiga, and is of course the result of practicing unsafe SEX (Software EXchange).
amp off
Amp off means “to run in background” and comes from the UNIX operator & (ampersand)1, which executes a command in the background.
Pretty intuitive and easy to use!
angry fruit salad
This idiom means “a bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors”.
I’ll write the following post (2) soon.