According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of
NeWS, GOSMACS and Java), to "...modify a program with no
idea whatsoever how it works." (See whacker.) It is actually
possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if the change is
small and well-defined and you are very good at glarking
things from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively easy
to change all stderr writes to stdout writes in a
piece of C filter code which remains otherwise mysterious.
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
