1. Code that is overly
tense and unmaintainable. "Perl may be a handy program,
but if you look at the source, it's complete joe code." 2. Badly
written, possibly buggy code.
Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a
particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed
that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code'
was intended in sense 1.
1994 update: This term has now generalized to `<name> code', used
to designate code with distinct characteristics traceable to its
author. "This section doesn't check for a NULL return from malloc()!
Oh. No wonder! It's Ed code!". Used most often with a programmer
who has left the shop and thus is a convenient scapegoat for
anything that is wrong with the project.
accumulator n. obs.
1. Archaic term for a register. On-line
use of it as a synonym for `register' is a fairly reliable
indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or
that the architecture under discussion is quite old....
