creep v.
To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably. In hackish usage
this verb has overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the
creeping horrors of low-budget monster movies.
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creeping elegance n.
Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become elegant past the point of diminishing
return, something which often happens at the expense of the less
interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things
deemed important in the Real
World. See also creeping featurism, second-system effect, tense.
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creeping featurism /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n.
[common] 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of
whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally
designed. See also feeping
creaturism. "You know, the main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." 2.
More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become
even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would
be even better if it had this feature too". (See feature.) The result is usually a patchwork
because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being
planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one
extra little feature to help someone ... and then
another ... and another.... When
creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually
this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could
also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and
new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious
redesigns; see second-system
effect. See also creeping elegance.
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creeping featuritis /kree'ping fee'-chr-i:`t*s/ n.
Variant of creeping
featurism, with its own spoonerization: `feeping
creaturitis'. Some people like to reserve this form for the
disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, as
opposed to the lurking general tendency in designers' minds.
(After all, -ism means `condition' or `pursuit of', whereas -itis
usually means `inflammation of'.)