: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 surface 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.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
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 surface 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.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
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... - hirsute: adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for {hairy}.
The AI Hackers... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware,
esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym... - trampoline: n. An incredibly {hairy} technique, found in some
{HLL} and program-overlay implementations (e.g.
on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation... - 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... - 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... - hirsute adj.
Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for hairy... - gnarly: /nar'lee/ adj. Both {obscure} and {hairy} (sense
1).
"{Yow!} --- the tuned assembler implementation of BitBlt...
