hairy adj.
1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative,
rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in
context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to
worry about." See also hirsute.
A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point
Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a 2-sphere into
itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate
hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with the informal
version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth."
The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in
slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it
was equivalent to modern `hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very
likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun
`long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying
sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair
was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture,
leaving hackish `hairy' as a sort of stunted mutant relic.
1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative,
rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in
context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to
worry about." See also hirsute.
A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point
Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a 2-sphere into
itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate
hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with the informal
version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth."
The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in
slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it
was equivalent to modern `hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very
likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun
`long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying
sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair
was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture,
leaving hackish `hairy' as a sort of stunted mutant relic.
Related:
- hairy adj.
1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy.
2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy.... - DWIM /dwim/
[acronym, `Do What I Mean'] 1. adj. Able
to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus
input was provided.
2. n. obs. The BBNLISP/INTERLISP function that attempted to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors.... - TECO /tee'koh/ n.,v. obs.
1. [originally an acronym for
`[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector'
later, `Text Editor and COrrector'] n. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody.... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware, esp.
one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature.... - hirsute adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for hairy.
- hirsute: adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for {hairy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary
- ampoline: n. An incredibly {hairy} technique, found in some
{HLL} and program-overlay implementations (e.
g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections.... - plumbing: [UNIX] n. Term used for {shell} code, so called
because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of
one program to the input of another.
Under UNIX, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell scrip... - ampoline n.
An incredibly hairy technique, found in
some HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.
g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections....
