bazaar n.,adj.
In 1997, after meditatating on the success of Linux for three years, the Jargon File's own
editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and
development models titled The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was
that Brooks's Law is not the
whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be
efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The
title metaphor caught on (see also cathedral), and the style of development
typical in the Linux community is now often referred to as the
bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and
often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer
reviewers.
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bboard /bee'bord/ n.
[contraction of `bulletin board'] 1. Any electronic bulletin
board; esp. used of BBS systems running
on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet newsgroup (in fact, use of this term for a
newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real
old-timer predating Usenet). 2. At CMU and other colleges with
similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin
boards. 3. The term `physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer
to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo
board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS
Lounge.
In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by
the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or
`market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the
better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at
CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".
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BBS /B-B-S/ n.
[common; abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] An electronic
bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people
can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped
(typically) into topic
groups. The term was especially applied to the thousands
of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet
microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by
amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single
modem line each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big
commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie
tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the
hacker culture, but they served a valuable function by knitting
together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world
who would otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all.
Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP;
efficiency has increased but a certain flavor has been lost. See
also bboard.
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BCPL // n.
[abbreviation, `Basic Combined Programming Language') A
programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in
1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of
compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It
reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the
language in which the original hello
world program was written. It has been ported to so many
different systems that its creator confesses to having lost
count. It has only one data type (a machine word) which can be
used as an integer, a character, a floating point number, a
pointer, or almost anything else, depending on context. BCPL was
a precursor of C, which inherited some of its features.