Entry tags:

computer science, culture

The New Hacker's Dictionary
The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd Edition

Compiled by Eric S. Raymond

Published by MIT Press, 1996.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback with a very colorful and amateurish-looking cover design for a book from MIT Press. It's 547 pages including the appendices and bibliography, plus a sizeable preferatory section.

The "New" in the title of this book is somewhat misleading. While this edition is indeed much revised from previous editions, the bulk of it is a lexicon of the culture of greybeard hackers rather than the current lingo, and its entries are often markedly nostalgic. This is more of a feature than a bug, as long as you know what to expect.

Here is a list of the first sixteen entries in the "E" sequence, see references not included:

• earthquake
  
• Easter egg
  
• Easter egging
  
• eat flaming death
  
• EBCDIC
  
• punched card
  
• echo
  
• eighty-column mind
  
• El Camino Bignum
  
• elder days
  
• elegant
  
• elephantine
  
• elevator controller
  
• elite
  
• ELIZA effect
  
• elvish
  

There is a lot of colorful material here; the book paints a fascinating picture of a subculture. The entries are written in a way that seems to welcome you to the that geeky male club of staying up all night programming and eating junk food and making nerdy jokes.

Here's one very typical entry, just for fun:

incantation n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned from a wizard. "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be forced into text space."

This is a useful and entertaining reference book.