The Jargon File (1991)

3 edent 1 8/24/2025, 8:14:10 AM jargon-file.org ↗

Comments (1)

anthk · 14h ago
This current Jargon File it's full of innacuracies showed up by Eric S. Raymond which tries to set a Unix origin of hacker related words which actually belong to the MIT/ITS/Lisp environment.

I'd suggest everyone read the 1.5 version and forget any further release.

https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.5.0.dos.txt

If any, ESR should get its facts right and create a correct one under a big new version release.

Also tons of tropes from ESR are ridiculously wrong. Hackers can be really diverse on music genres and preferences. Millenials like me were born in a really 'slow' world so fast, progressive music was a reflection on how people needed instant access to data and facts from the world. Were were utterly bored, so, upbeat and fast Techno music was king.

Gen-Z ers are literally in the polar side. They already live 'accelerated', so what they actually are into it's slowed down tempos. If we were depicted as like travelling in a Ferrari at crazy speeds with Eurobeat, they would focus on drifting down curves and making a cool move.

And then there were the oddballs (jack of all trades) with really expanded down genres were crazy fusions were the norm, such as Diablo Swing Orchestra. You'll get the same behaviour on odd tastes, too. These kind of people didn't use neither Macs nor Arch+i3 combos, with fvwm/cwm and maybe some really different FVWM setup depicting real life papers sheets and whatnot. Instead of solving a problem analitically, they will get into crazy ways to solve someting, an actual hacked up way.

A gopher/IRC client inside a MUD? Done. Reading up HN by mail with a client quickly hacked up in Python? Yep. Writting down some CSS to mimic a newspaper? Sure. Reusing an RSS reader script to let flite to listen aloud (TTS) to your news sources while doing cleaning chores at home? Clever.

Also, on high IQ tropes, most hackers would be bored in seconds with any logic puzzle set to be solved easily with computers (such as the ones from SGT, the Putty guy), because most (if not all) of them can be solved analitically with Lisp/Haskell and whatnot in few minutes and call it a day.

Hackers hate doing the same task twice. I was never into Rubik puzzles. Once you can automate it, either with a computer or with Math with a simple pen and paper, there no puzzle anymore. Just different states.

Thus, lateral thinking puzzles (or maybe crime/mistery related riddles) would be a far greater challenge than solving Sudoku with a recursive algorythm which is a solved problem.