The original version of this dictionary: <a href="https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html</a><p><pre><code> "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."</code></pre>
Related threads below. Have I missed one? Surprisingly little over the years.<p>Newer cohorts don't always know the classics/perennials*, so the occasional thread is a good thing - but should we change the link to one of these?<p><a href="https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html</a><p><a href="http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt</a><p><a href="http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html</a><p>* <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20perennials&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>
It would be great if someone with appropriate "back in the day" credentials would take over membership of this document and powerwash the gratuitous Eric Raymond edits and insertions off of it.
There's a terrible/great genre thriller by Jeffery Deaver called 'The Blue Nowhere'. Whoever ghost wrote it seems to have set themselves the goal of using every word from the jargon file. Unintentionally hilarious.
If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times.<p>Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists, Linux ate Unix, and there have been several bright subcultures which have no meaningful presence in either edition of the Jargon file. Considering self-professed tribalism of the original authors, it’s hardly surprising.<p>Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.<p>It would be interesting to have a compilation of jargon as it evolved through the 1990s and 2000s too.
Hacker Writing Style > Quotations and punctuation. That part hits hard because it really shows up in my writing (I didn’t know that it was incorrect English grammar until my teacher told me)