Related:

• BASIC /bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960
  which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers....
• oy language: n. A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming.
  {Bad Thing}s can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see {bondage-and-discipline language})...
• Pascal n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming.
  This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
• Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical.
  Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers....
• bare metal n. 1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an operating system, an bit bashing needed to create these basic tools for a new machine.
  Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment....
• bit-paired keyboard n.,obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment.
  The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage....
• proglet: /prog'let/ [UK] n. A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need.
  Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and containing no subroutines....
• cycle crunch: n. A situation wherein the number of people trying to use a computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to {thrash}.
  This scenario is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing....
• Turing tar-pit n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical.
  Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers....