klone /klohn/ n.
See clone, sense 4.
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kludge 1. /klooj/ n.
Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused
in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in
Great Britain since the end of World War II. 2. [TMRC] A crock that works. (A long-ago "Datamation"
article by Jackson Granholme similarly said: "An ill-assorted
collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing
whole.") 3. v. To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've
kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly
later."
This word appears to have derived from Scots `kludge' or
`kludgie' for a common toilet, via British military slang. It
apparently became confused with U.S. kluge during or after World War II; some Britons
from that era use both words in definably different ways, but
kluge is now uncommon in Great
Britain. `Kludge' in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from
`kluge' in that it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is
something no Commonwealth hacker wants to be associated too
closely with. Also, `kludge' is more widely known in British
mainstream slang than `kluge' is in the U.S.
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K =
kluge /klooj/
[from the German `klug', clever; poss. related to Polish
`klucz' (a key, a hint, a main point)] 1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or
Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. 2. n. A
clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty
case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair
bugs. Often involves ad-hockery
and verges on being a crock. 3. n.
Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. vt. To insert a
kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around
that weird bug, but there's probably a better way." 5. [WPI] n. A
feature that is implemented in a rude
manner.
Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant
spelling `kludge'. Reports from old
farts are consistent that `kluge' was the original
spelling, reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s
and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware kluges.
In 1947, the "New York Folklore Quarterly" reported a classic
shaggy-dog story `Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker' then current in the
Armed Forces, in which a `kluge' was a complex and puzzling
artifact with a trivial function. Other sources report that
`kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era for any piece of
electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at
sea.
However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a
decade older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand
name of a device called a "Kluge paper feeder", an adjunct to
mechanical printing presses. Legend has it that the Kluge feeder
was designed before small, cheap electric motors and control
electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of
cams, belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its
operations from one motive driveshaft. It was accordingly
temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly
difficult to repair -- but oh, so clever! People who tell this
story also aver that `Kluge' was the name of a design
engineer.
There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family
business that manufactures printing equipment - interestingly,
their name is pronounced /kloo'gee/! Henry Brandtjen, president
of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded
by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloo'gee/, who built
and co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr.
Brandtjen claims, however, that this was a simple device
(with only four cams); he says he has no idea how the myth of its
complexity took hold.
TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of
the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that
remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also
foobar). It seems likely that
`kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics
projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
venerable Building 20, in which TMRC
is also located) during the war.
The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the Datamation article mentioned above; it
was titled "How to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30, 31).
This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where
kludge has an independent history
(though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either side
of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group
_alt.folklore.computers_ over the First and Second Edition
versions of this entry; everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now appears that the British, having
forgotten the etymology of their own `kludge' when `kluge'
crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the `kludge'
orthography in the other direction and confusing their American
cousins' spelling!
The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S.
hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly
for its meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'. (Phonetically,
consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to
sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other
areas, English spelling is perfectly consistent about this
distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use
it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent.
European hackers have mostly learned the word from written
American sources and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the
wider American meaning!
Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the
word's meaning.