card walloper n.
An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do stupid
things like print people's paychecks. Compare code grinder. See also punched card, eighty-column mind.
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walloper, Up:= C =
careware /keir'weir/ n.
A variety of shareware for
which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a
nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on
top of the distribution charge. Syn. charityware; compare crippleware, sense 2.
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programming, Next:cascade,
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cargo cult programming n.
A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual
inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real
purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra
code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past,
but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently
avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare shotgun debugging, voodoo programming).
The term `cargo cult' is a reference to aboriginal religions
that grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The
practices of these cults center on building elaborate mockups of
airplanes and military style landing strips in the hope of
bringing the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such
marvelous cargo during the war. Hackish usage probably derives
from Richard Feynman's characterization of certain practices as
"cargo cult science" in his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman!" (W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, ISBN
0-393-01921-7).
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cascade n.
1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output produced by
a compiler with poor error recovery. Too frequently, one trivial
syntax error (such as a missing `)' or `}') throws the parser out
of synch so that much of the remaining program text is
interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed. 2. A chain of Usenet
followups, each adding some trivial variation or riposte to the
text of the previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new
message; an include war in
which the object is to create a sort of communal graffito.
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case and paste n.
[from `cut and paste'] 1. The addition of a new feature to an existing system by selecting the
code from an existing feature and pasting it in with minor
changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in a
telephone switch are selected using case statements.
Leads to software
bloat.
In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by
Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block
of text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in
elsewhere. The term is condescending, implying that the
programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully
about what is required to integrate the code for two similar
cases.
At DEC (now Compaq), this is
sometimes called `clone-and-hack' coding.
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paste, Up:= C =
casters-up mode n.
[IBM, prob. fr. slang _belly up_] Yet another synonym for
`broken' or `down'. Usually connotes a major failure. A system
(hardware or software) which is `down' may be already being
restarted before the failure is noticed, whereas one which is
`casters up' is usually a good excuse to take the rest of the day
off (as long as you're not responsible for fixing it).
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casting the runes n.
What a guru does when you ask him
or her to run a particular program and type at it because it
never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever see
what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser does.
Compare incantation, runes, examining the entrails;
also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in "Some AI Koans" (Appendix A).
A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most
talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to
service machines which the field
circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside
out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick
outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some
site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks
solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the
system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and
cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a
minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed
replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon
the replacement.