barney n.
In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to fred (sense #1) as bar
is to foo. That is, people who commonly
use `fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use
`barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone
and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.
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baroque adj.
[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on
excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has
many of the connotations of elephantine or monstrosity but is less extreme and not
pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce
random variations to its letterform output. Now that is
baroque!" See also rococo.
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BASIC /bay'-sic/ n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for
many years was the leading cause of brain damage in
proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings
on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically
impossible to teach good programming style to students that have
had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another
case (like Pascal) of the cascading
lossage that happens when a
language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken
too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the
order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is
very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it
harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so
bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of
thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty
any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and
control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a backronym. BASIC was originally named Basic,
simply because it was a simple and basic programming language.
Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms,
BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No
acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can
verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around
the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC
because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code is the one that caught on.
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batbelt n.
Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers,
cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket
knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers
from their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once,
the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt; hence
it is referred to as a batbelt.