5 ms·

The original version of this dictionary: https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html "This file, jargon.txt, was

by mepian 3y ago

The original version of this dictionary: https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html "This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical. This page, however, is pretty much the original, snarfed from MIT-AI around 1988."

reaperducer 3y ago
The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: "Foodp?" I'm old enough to have been active in this era, and to have sent messages on teletypes using the "P" suffix. But for us, it had nothing to do with LISP. Our machines weren't that cool. In fact, they were so lame that many of the printing terminals lacked a question mark character. The P was used as a substitute for a ? because it was the closest visual substitution. And naturally, most of our messages were one or two words for economy. "FOODP" would print correctly on machines that couldn't print "FOOD?" Not everyone had a fancy glass terminal, so you had to assume the worst case scenario, and use "P" in case someone was on paper. On a related note, to make it easier to count spaces in indented code, we would use a "b" character with a slash through it. So the teletype was print b, then back up a space by sending ^H, and then put a / through it. It looked terrible, but got the job done. It used up a lot of ink, but the bosses were watching paper use, not ink.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  This is the problem with the Hacker's Dictionary. Some of the stuff in it turned out to be just plain not what the people involved were actually doing.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Wirth silver(?) Pascal book used 'b' overstruck with a backslash when spaces needed to be shown explicitly. I wonder if there's a unicode for that.
  - kens 3y ago
    There is U+2422 Blank Symbol (␢).
- gumby 3y ago
  "Splitp soup?" "T" We used to even use this in speech sometimes, especially when funny (say, agreeing to share Hot and Sour soup at Mary's, for which the conversation above would work well). Note the amusing pointlessness of p in this case since when speaking you'd pronounce a question anyway.
- antigonemerlin 3y ago
  Reminds me of "ye", pronounced and meaning "the", in English, because medieval printers imported from Germany didn't have that letter "Þ' and 'Y' was the closest substitute.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    It's worth noting that "ye" also existed as the second person plural pronoun while "þe" simultaneously existed as a second person singular. These are now merged in most English dialects. Getting the unrelated definite article "þe" mixed up in this and substituting a "y" was more than just a matter of misguided font substitution because some forms of the handwritten thorn look very similar to a "y". Two words pronounced "the", one of which is easily conflated with another spelled and pronounced "ye" leads to the inevitable result.
deepspace 3y ago
> in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together Not only that, but the man's disgusting political and social views tarnished everything he touched.
- detourdog 3y ago
  He definitely grabbed headlines. Once I looked I found nothing there. I wondered about his community because he always seemed isolated and or armed.
  - aew4ytasghe5 3y ago
    Seems probable seeing the kind of attacks of his political views in this thread. I'd too keep a firearm for voicing social justice opinions in a country fubar:ed by grief.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Many responsible gun owners never publicly state their ownership. Talking about guns in belligerent fashion is one form of gun ownership. I haven’t seen any threats of violence just the acustaion of being a knucklehead that owns firearms.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Here are two versions of the original jargon file from AI:HUMOR; free of ESR's pollution: AI:HUMOR;MITSAI JARGON (25.3 KB): https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/mitsai.jargon https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/mitsai.j... AI:HUMOR;JARGON > (85.3 KB): https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/jargon.68 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/jargon.6... Also NASA jargon: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/nasa.jargon https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/nasa.jar... Alice's PDP-10 is also a classic: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/alices.pdp10 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/alices.p... There was all kinds of mean nasty ugly people there on the bench... Chaosnet designers... Lisp hackers... TECO hackers. TECO hackers right there on the bench with me! And the meanest one of them, the hairiest TECO hacker of them all was coming over to me. And he was mean and nasty and horrible and undocumented and all kinds of stuff. And he sat down next to me and said: [1:i\*^Yu14<q1&377.f"nir'q1/400.u1>^[[8 .-z(1702117120m81869946983m8w660873337m8w1466458484m8 )+z,.f^@fx\*[0:ft^]0^[w^\ And I said "I didn't get nothing, I had to rebuild the bittable in queue six" and he said: [1:i\*^Yu16<q1&77.+32iq1f"l#-1/100.#-1&7777777777.'"#/100.'u1r>6c^[[6 .(675041640067.m6w416300715765.m6w004445675045.m6 455445440046.m6w576200535144.m6w370000000000.m6),.fx\*[0:ft^]0^[w^\
- bear8642 3y ago
  Are these meant to just be incomprehensible, or is there some translation possible? Haven't heard the song for awhile.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    TECO really is that incomprehensible. I don't understand it myself, but here's another example that I remember seeing in Marvin Minsky's home directory on MIT-AI, which I'm glad I asked about years ago on HN, because Harold Ancel just happened to save a copy of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161002 DonHopkins on Sept 2, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy –... I remember running across a Turing machine emulator implemented in TECO in Minsky's home directory that I'd REALLY love to get ahold of. hga on Sept 2, 2015 [–] Ask and yea shall receive: MSG: APL 1 DISTRIB: *BBOARD EXPIRES: 03/17/81 23:08:54 MINSKY@MIT-MC 03/11/81 23:08:54 Re: too-short programs APL is compact, I suppose. So is TECO. When I wrote the following Universal Turing Machine, which works, I actually understood it. [ I've interpolated the non-printing characters as displayed by (Gnu) EMACS, escape is ^], ^^ is one character, as is \356: ] i1Aul qq+^^0:iqm^[29iiq\356y0L1 00L1 11L2 A1L1 y0L1 0yR2 1AR2 AyR6 yyL3 00L0 1AL3 A1L4 yyL4 0yR5 11L7 A1L4 yyR5 0yL3 1AR5 A1R5 yyR6 0AL3 1AR6 A1R6 y0R7 0yR6 11R7 A0R2 ^[j<sR^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii^[ciuq'^[> j<sL^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii-2c^[ciuq'^[>jxblx1lx2lx3lx4lx5lx6lx7hk iyyAyyAyy^[32<i0^[>ji110101110000010011011^[ 1uq<htmbqq=> I do not advise attempting to understand this code, which is almost as bad as that for the Universal Turing machine. ADDED: or http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt Please ack receipt of this and/or send me email (in my HN info); for others, note this is ITS TECO, which I was told was by far the most powerful version of it (fortunately, by the time I showed up learning it was no longer really necessary). DonHopkins on Sept 3, 2015 | parent [–] OOP ACK! It was a shot in the dark, but I am SO GLAD I asked!!! Thank you Harold! It looks just like I remember. ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356932 >I deeply appreciate and am greatly privileged to benefit from the MIT AI Lab's "Tourist Policy" and general openness, generosity, and encouragement of education, which allowed me to use the lab's PDP-10s over the ARPANET as a high school student. [...]
jejones3141 3y ago
Perhaps the thing to do is put it in a git repository, so people can retrieve the version they want.
detourdog 3y ago
Wow, thanks for the clarification. I try be scholarly in my cultural understanding of computing development and I hadnt heard this perspective. This is such an interesting group dynamic where a work product of one group gets twisted by another group and claims ownership. The embrace and extend method.
smileykenziekv 3y ago
I didn't realize there was another version of this. I will look at both and get my own personal comparison

by mepian 3y ago

reaperducer 3y ago

The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: "Foodp?" I'm old enough to have been active in this era, and to have sent messages on teletypes using the "P" suffix. But for us, it had nothing to do with LISP. Our machines weren't that cool. In fact, they were so lame that many of the printing terminals lacked a question mark character. The P was used as a substitute for a ? because it was the closest visual substitution. And naturally, most of our messages were one or two words for economy. "FOODP" would print correctly on machines that couldn't print "FOOD?" Not everyone had a fancy glass terminal, so you had to assume the worst case scenario, and use "P" in case someone was on paper. On a related note, to make it easier to count spaces in indented code, we would use a "b" character with a slash through it. So the teletype was print b, then back up a space by sending ^H, and then put a / through it. It looked terrible, but got the job done. It used up a lot of ink, but the bosses were watching paper use, not ink.

JdeBP 3y ago
This is the problem with the Hacker's Dictionary. Some of the stuff in it turned out to be just plain not what the people involved were actually doing.
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
Wirth silver(?) Pascal book used 'b' overstruck with a backslash when spaces needed to be shown explicitly. I wonder if there's a unicode for that.
- kens 3y ago
  There is U+2422 Blank Symbol (␢).
gumby 3y ago
"Splitp soup?" "T" We used to even use this in speech sometimes, especially when funny (say, agreeing to share Hot and Sour soup at Mary's, for which the conversation above would work well). Note the amusing pointlessness of p in this case since when speaking you'd pronounce a question anyway.
antigonemerlin 3y ago
Reminds me of "ye", pronounced and meaning "the", in English, because medieval printers imported from Germany didn't have that letter "Þ' and 'Y' was the closest substitute.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  It's worth noting that "ye" also existed as the second person plural pronoun while "þe" simultaneously existed as a second person singular. These are now merged in most English dialects. Getting the unrelated definite article "þe" mixed up in this and substituting a "y" was more than just a matter of misguided font substitution because some forms of the handwritten thorn look very similar to a "y". Two words pronounced "the", one of which is easily conflated with another spelled and pronounced "ye" leads to the inevitable result.

deepspace 3y ago

> in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together Not only that, but the man's disgusting political and social views tarnished everything he touched.

detourdog 3y ago
He definitely grabbed headlines. Once I looked I found nothing there. I wondered about his community because he always seemed isolated and or armed.
- aew4ytasghe5 3y ago
  Seems probable seeing the kind of attacks of his political views in this thread. I'd too keep a firearm for voicing social justice opinions in a country fubar:ed by grief.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Many responsible gun owners never publicly state their ownership. Talking about guns in belligerent fashion is one form of gun ownership. I haven’t seen any threats of violence just the acustaion of being a knucklehead that owns firearms.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Here are two versions of the original jargon file from AI:HUMOR; free of ESR's pollution: AI:HUMOR;MITSAI JARGON (25.3 KB): https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/mitsai.jargon https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/mitsai.j... AI:HUMOR;JARGON > (85.3 KB): https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/jargon.68 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/jargon.6... Also NASA jargon: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/nasa.jargon https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/nasa.jar... Alice's PDP-10 is also a classic: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/alices.pdp10 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/alices.p... There was all kinds of mean nasty ugly people there on the bench... Chaosnet designers... Lisp hackers... TECO hackers. TECO hackers right there on the bench with me! And the meanest one of them, the hairiest TECO hacker of them all was coming over to me. And he was mean and nasty and horrible and undocumented and all kinds of stuff. And he sat down next to me and said: [1:i\*^Yu14<q1&377.f"nir'q1/400.u1>^[[8 .-z(1702117120m81869946983m8w660873337m8w1466458484m8 )+z,.f^@fx\*[0:ft^]0^[w^\ And I said "I didn't get nothing, I had to rebuild the bittable in queue six" and he said: [1:i\*^Yu16<q1&77.+32iq1f"l#-1/100.#-1&7777777777.'"#/100.'u1r>6c^[[6 .(675041640067.m6w416300715765.m6w004445675045.m6 455445440046.m6w576200535144.m6w370000000000.m6),.fx\*[0:ft^]0^[w^\

bear8642 3y ago
Are these meant to just be incomprehensible, or is there some translation possible? Haven't heard the song for awhile.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  TECO really is that incomprehensible. I don't understand it myself, but here's another example that I remember seeing in Marvin Minsky's home directory on MIT-AI, which I'm glad I asked about years ago on HN, because Harold Ancel just happened to save a copy of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161002 DonHopkins on Sept 2, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy –... I remember running across a Turing machine emulator implemented in TECO in Minsky's home directory that I'd REALLY love to get ahold of. hga on Sept 2, 2015 [–] Ask and yea shall receive: MSG: APL 1 DISTRIB: *BBOARD EXPIRES: 03/17/81 23:08:54 MINSKY@MIT-MC 03/11/81 23:08:54 Re: too-short programs APL is compact, I suppose. So is TECO. When I wrote the following Universal Turing Machine, which works, I actually understood it. [ I've interpolated the non-printing characters as displayed by (Gnu) EMACS, escape is ^], ^^ is one character, as is \356: ] i1Aul qq+^^0:iqm^[29iiq\356y0L1 00L1 11L2 A1L1 y0L1 0yR2 1AR2 AyR6 yyL3 00L0 1AL3 A1L4 yyL4 0yR5 11L7 A1L4 yyR5 0yL3 1AR5 A1R5 yyR6 0AL3 1AR6 A1R6 y0R7 0yR6 11R7 A0R2 ^[j<sR^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii^[ciuq'^[> j<sL^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii-2c^[ciuq'^[>jxblx1lx2lx3lx4lx5lx6lx7hk iyyAyyAyy^[32<i0^[>ji110101110000010011011^[ 1uq<htmbqq=> I do not advise attempting to understand this code, which is almost as bad as that for the Universal Turing machine. ADDED: or http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt Please ack receipt of this and/or send me email (in my HN info); for others, note this is ITS TECO, which I was told was by far the most powerful version of it (fortunately, by the time I showed up learning it was no longer really necessary). DonHopkins on Sept 3, 2015 | parent [–] OOP ACK! It was a shot in the dark, but I am SO GLAD I asked!!! Thank you Harold! It looks just like I remember. ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356932 >I deeply appreciate and am greatly privileged to benefit from the MIT AI Lab's "Tourist Policy" and general openness, generosity, and encouragement of education, which allowed me to use the lab's PDP-10s over the ARPANET as a high school student. [...]

jejones3141 3y ago

Perhaps the thing to do is put it in a git repository, so people can retrieve the version they want.

detourdog 3y ago

Wow, thanks for the clarification. I try be scholarly in my cultural understanding of computing development and I hadnt heard this perspective. This is such an interesting group dynamic where a work product of one group gets twisted by another group and claims ownership. The embrace and extend method.

smileykenziekv 3y ago

I didn't realize there was another version of this. I will look at both and get my own personal comparison