tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 19 13:50:04 2014
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Need a word for ...
<div dir="ltr">Before we can suggest Klingon expressions for "cruft", we need to agree on what it means. The best explanation of "cruft" was written by Neal Stephenson in his essay "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", in his section about BeOS. Excerpt below.<div><br></div><div>bI'reng</div><div><br></div><div># # #</div><div><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to other people. In order to explain why I need to explain the concept of cruft, which, to people who write code, is nearly as abhorrent as unnecessary repetition.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">If you've been to San Francisco you may have seen older buildings that have undergone "seismic upgrades," which frequently means that grotesque superstructures of modern steelwork are erected around buildings made in, say, a Classical style. When new threats arrive--if we have an Ice Age, for example--additional layers of even more high-tech stuff may be constructed, in turn, around these, until the original building is like a holy relic in a cathedral--a shard of yellowed bone enshrined in half a ton of fancy protective junk.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky old operating systems working. It happens all the time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought to be simplified by the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no aesthetic or cultural merit that makes them intrinsically worth saving. But it doesn't work that way in practice. If you work with a computer, you have probably customized your "desktop," the environment in which you sit down to work every day, and spent a lot of money on software that works in that environment, and devoted much time to familiarizing yourself with how it all works. This takes a lot of time, and time is money. As already mentioned, the desire to have one's interactions with complex technologies simplified through the interface, and to surround yourself with virtual tchotchkes and lawn ornaments, is natural and pervasive--presumably a reaction against the complexity and formidable abstraction of the computer world. Computers give us more choices than we really want. We prefer to make those choices once, or accept the defaults handed to us by software companies, and let sleeping dogs lie. But when an OS gets changed, all the dogs jump up and start barking.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">The average computer user is a technological antiquarian who doesn't really like things to change. He or she is like an urban professional who has just bought a charming fixer-upper and is now moving the furniture and knicknacks around, and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, so that everything's just right. If it is necessary for a bunch of engineers to scurry around in the basement shoring up the foundation so that it can support the new cast-iron claw-foot bathtub, and snaking new wires and pipes through the walls to supply modern appliances, why, so be it--engineers are cheap, at least when millions of OS users split the cost of their services.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Likewise, computer users want to have the latest Pentium in their machines, and to be able to surf the web, without messing up all the stuff that makes them feel as if they know what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is actually possible. Adding more RAM to your system is a good example of an upgrade that is not likely to screw anything up.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence Lessig, the whilom Special Master in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft, complained that he had installed Internet Explorer on his computer, and in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his personal list of signposts that he used to navigate through the maze of the Internet. It was as if he'd bought a new set of tires for his car, and then, when pulling away from the garage, discovered that, owing to some inscrutable side-effect, every signpost and road map in the world had been destroyed. If he's like most of us, he had put a lot of work into compiling that list of bookmarks. This is only a small taste of the sort of trouble that upgrades can cause. Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in order to give us the benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about it, or to change our ways, produces a lot of code that, over time, turns into a giant clot of bubble gum, spackle, baling wire and duct tape surrounding every operating system. In the jargon of hackers, it is called "cruft." An operating system that has many, many layers of it is described as "crufty." Hackers hate to do things twice, but when they see something crufty, their first impulse is to rip it out, throw it away, and start anew.</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">If Mark Twain were brought back to San Francisco today and dropped into one of these old seismically upgraded buildings, it would look just the same to him, with all the doors and windows in the same places--but if he stepped outside, he wouldn't recognize it. And--if he'd been brought back with his wits intact--he might question whether the building had been worth going to so much trouble to save. At some point, one must ask the question: is this really worth it, or should we maybe just tear it down and put up a good one? Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall over and build a tower that doesn't suck?</p><p style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Helvetica,Arial;font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good idea when the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance, sound prudent management. This is especially true if (as it were) you never look into the cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who spends all his time looking at it from that point of view, cruft is fundamentally disgusting, and you can't avoid wanting to go after it with a crowbar. Or, better yet, simply walk out of the building--let the Leaning Tower of Pisa fall over--and go make a new one THAT DOESN'T LEAN.</p></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 4:03 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:[email protected]"; target="_blank">[email protected]</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">All are good suggestions, with {lI'wI' Deq} scoring really high, but given the fully nuanced definition in Wikipedia, cruft really is a word more specific in meaning than any of these. For hardware, it can mean something that never was really useful, but it sure was high tech, and now the tech is completely useless.<br>
<br>
Consider the supersonic, long-range bomber that the Air Force built and put in place briefly, before intercontinental missiles made it both obsolete and too expensive to justify maintaining. It looked cool, like an SST with hinged wings that would droop at the ends at high speed when it becomes important for the wings to NOT generate lift. It is one of the very few aircraft in history to exceed Mach 3. Now? Maybe there's one or two in a museum somewhere, but the rest are probably sitting in a military junkyard in a desert somewhere, partly stripped, corroding, awaiting a future age for archeologists to dig it up and wonder what it was, like a dinosaur, slowly sinking into a tar pit.<br>
<br>
Or the Apple Newton. It was a brilliant idea that so many man-hours and so much money went into at a time when the end result could not live up to the expected functionality because of limits in the technology that could not be foreseen until the whole thing was assembled and tested by the public. Apple mass produced a thing that nobody wanted, and they couldn't know that nobody wanted it until they produced it.<br>
<br>
Or Windows Compact Edition: The all-time prize winner in terms of its acronym: WinCE. It actually was sold with that acronym. What were they thinking?<br>
<br>
For software, it can refer to badly written modules of code that need to be replaced before the whole software package can be properly functional, or modules that were well adapted to earlier versions of the software, but now because of feature shift or changing standards, it no longer functions well in the software package and need to be replaced or removed, or it can refer to complex and unnecessary codes in documents, as in the junk that MS Word puts in a document when converting it into a Web page.<br>
<br>
These are not simple leftovers. This is not simple garbage or debris. These are things carefully constructed by misguided hands and minds, often lacking sufficient context at time of construction to comprehend why it would be so poorly adapted to the future it will become a part of. It's quite often expensive to create and difficult to remove.<br>
<br>
It's geek poetry, not simple landfill material to be handled by a scullery maid.<br>
<br>
cruft.<br>
<br>
It's the tech version of Darwin's losers. When it was born, it couldn't know that it couldn't compete. They figured it was worth a try, right?<br>
<br>
I'm sticking to it. I want a word for cruft.<br>
<span class="im HOEnZb"><br>
lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh<br>
Retired Door Repair Guy<br>
<br>
</span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">> On Nov 19, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Felix Malmenbeck <<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
> chaq Qap «DI chuv», «lI'Ha'pu'wI'», «lI'wI' Deq» joq.<br>
><br>
> ________________________________________<br>
> From: Alan Anderson [<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>]<br>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 20:17<br>
> To: tlhIngan Hol mailing list<br>
> Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Need a word for ...<br>
><br>
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:05 PM, <<a href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a>> wrote:<br>
>> I have a new favorite word in English, and I really want an equivalent in Klingon:<br>
>><br>
>> cruft<br>
>><br>
>> If we have words for scalene triangle, we need a word for cruft.<br>
>> It's such a glorious, perfect word for the warrior's tongue.<br>
><br>
> qechvaD Qap <DI> qar'a'? veQ 'oHbe'law'. rut 'ut. vI' neH.<br>
><br>
> -- ghunchu'wI'<br>
><br>
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