Grokking Books
I aim to write elegant code. I’ll settle with cuspy, but never crufty. Cuspy, crufty and snarfed. The words, the buzzwords, and to many it’s all techno-babble. Beautifully elucidated in what was the jargon file. That’s how I knew it growing up at Sun Microsystems in the late 80s. I snarfed my jargon.txt file from a server at perdue.edu, you can snarf from here: https://archive.org/stream/jarg422/jarg422.txt
SNARF v. To grab, esp. a large document or file for the purpose of using it either with or without the author’s permission. :-O
ELEGANT [from mathematical usage] adj. Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than clever, winning, or even cuspy.
CUSPY [from the DEC acronym CUSP, for Commonly Used System Program, i.e., a utility program used by many people] (WPI) adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program which performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See Rude.
CRUFTY [from “cruddy”] adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly overly complex. “This is standard old crufty DEC software”. Hence cruft, n. shoddy construction. Also Cruft, v. to write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk…
The jargon file was famous in techie-circles and would ultimately be published in book form. “The New Hackers Dictionary”1 – Eric S. Raymond and Guy L. Steele Jr.
It’s fascinating how the word hacker is usually perceived as negative, yet the word hackathon considered positive.
“Rules for Revolutionaries“1 – Guy Kawasaki. In my top ten business books. One of the things Guy proposed was: “Eat like a bird poop like an elephant”. The context was creation of products and services and how to bring them to market. Essentially the notion of how to shift the paradigm. How to be a successful revolutionary. Two parts implied:
- Voraciously consume information – akin to a hummingbird (they consume 1/2 their body weight daily), and
- Liberally spread the knowledge – akin to an elephant (they excrement over 100 lbs daily)
It’s a recommendation of how to connect ideas and create value. And, it’s stuck with me ever since. Book links below.
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1. New Hacker’s Dictionary – https://smile.amazon.co.uk/New-Hackers-Dictionary-Eric-Raymond/dp/0262181452
2. Rules for Revolutionaries – https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Rules-Revolutionaries-Capitalist-Manifesto-Marketing/dp/088730995X