trivial adj.
1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's
time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that
anyone not utterly cretinous
would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has
already solved (some claim that hackish `trivial' usually
evaluates to `I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of
triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers.
See nontrivial, uninteresting.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an
amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely
You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), defined `trivial theorem' as "one
that has already been proved".
Node:troff, Next:troglodyte, Previous:trivial, Up:= T
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troff /T'rof/ or /trof/ n.
[Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting
and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11
assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late
Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn
modeled after the Multics and CTSS program RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer
(that name came from the expression "to run off a
copy"). A companion program, nroff,
formats output for terminals and line printers.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive
phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper
describing that work ("A Typesetter-independent troff," AT&T
CSTR #97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the
program's "obvious deficiencies -- a rebarbative input syntax,
mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a
voracious appetite for computer resources" and noting the
ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals,
Kernighan concludes:
None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating
Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably
robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of
preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never
conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace
under fire.
The success of TeX and desktop
publishing systems have reduced troff's relative
importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths
that secured troff a place in hacker folklore;
indeed, it could be taken more generally as an indication of
those qualities of good programs that, in the long run, hackers
most admire.