[Tlhingan-hol] Need a word for ...

[Brent Kesler]

Before we can suggest Klingon expressions for "cruft", we need to agree on
what it means. The best explanation of "cruft" was written by Neal
Stephenson in his essay "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", in his
section about BeOS. Excerpt below.

bI'reng

# # #

Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to other people. In
order to explain why I need to explain the concept of cruft, which, to
people who write code, is nearly as abhorrent as unnecessary repetition.

If you've been to San Francisco you may have seen older buildings that have
undergone "seismic upgrades," which frequently means that grotesque
superstructures of modern steelwork are erected around buildings made in,
say, a Classical style. When new threats arrive--if we have an Ice Age, for
example--additional layers of even more high-tech stuff may be constructed,
in turn, around these, until the original building is like a holy relic in
a cathedral--a shard of yellowed bone enshrined in half a ton of fancy
protective junk.

Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky old operating systems
working. It happens all the time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought to be
simplified by the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no aesthetic
or cultural merit that makes them intrinsically worth saving. But it
doesn't work that way in practice. If you work with a computer, you have
probably customized your "desktop," the environment in which you sit down
to work every day, and spent a lot of money on software that works in that
environment, and devoted much time to familiarizing yourself with how it
all works. This takes a lot of time, and time is money. As already
mentioned, the desire to have one's interactions with complex technologies
simplified through the interface, and to surround yourself with virtual
tchotchkes and lawn ornaments, is natural and pervasive--presumably a
reaction against the complexity and formidable abstraction of the computer
world. Computers give us more choices than we really want. We prefer to
make those choices once, or accept the defaults handed to us by software
companies, and let sleeping dogs lie. But when an OS gets changed, all the
dogs jump up and start barking.

The average computer user is a technological antiquarian who doesn't really
like things to change. He or she is like an urban professional who has just
bought a charming fixer-upper and is now moving the furniture and
knicknacks around, and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, so that
everything's just right. If it is necessary for a bunch of engineers to
scurry around in the basement shoring up the foundation so that it can
support the new cast-iron claw-foot bathtub, and snaking new wires and
pipes through the walls to supply modern appliances, why, so be
it--engineers are cheap, at least when millions of OS users split the cost
of their services.

Likewise, computer users want to have the latest Pentium in their machines,
and to be able to surf the web, without messing up all the stuff that makes
them feel as if they know what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is
actually possible. Adding more RAM to your system is a good example of an
upgrade that is not likely to screw anything up.

Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence Lessig, the
whilom Special Master in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against
Microsoft, complained that he had installed Internet Explorer on his
computer, and in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his personal list of
signposts that he used to navigate through the maze of the Internet. It was
as if he'd bought a new set of tires for his car, and then, when pulling
away from the garage, discovered that, owing to some inscrutable
side-effect, every signpost and road map in the world had been destroyed.
If he's like most of us, he had put a lot of work into compiling that list
of bookmarks. This is only a small taste of the sort of trouble that
upgrades can cause. Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative
sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in order to give us
the benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about it, or to
change our ways, produces a lot of code that, over time, turns into a giant
clot of bubble gum, spackle, baling wire and duct tape surrounding every
operating system. In the jargon of hackers, it is called "cruft." An
operating system that has many, many layers of it is described as "crufty."
Hackers hate to do things twice, but when they see something crufty, their
first impulse is to rip it out, throw it away, and start anew.

If Mark Twain were brought back to San Francisco today and dropped into one
of these old seismically upgraded buildings, it would look just the same to
him, with all the doors and windows in the same places--but if he stepped
outside, he wouldn't recognize it. And--if he'd been brought back with his
wits intact--he might question whether the building had been worth going to
so much trouble to save. At some point, one must ask the question: is this
really worth it, or should we maybe just tear it down and put up a good
one? Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at
stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing
fall over and build a tower that doesn't suck?

Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good idea
when the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance, sound prudent
management. This is especially true if (as it were) you never look into the
cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who spends all his
time looking at it from that point of view, cruft is fundamentally
disgusting, and you can't avoid wanting to go after it with a crowbar. Or,
better yet, simply walk out of the building--let the Leaning Tower of Pisa
fall over--and go make a new one THAT DOESN'T LEAN.

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 4:03 PM, <lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com> wrote:

> All are good suggestions, with {lI'wI' Deq} scoring really high, but given
> the fully nuanced definition in Wikipedia, cruft really is a word more
> specific in meaning than any of these. For hardware, it can mean something
> that never was really useful, but it sure was high tech, and now the tech
> is completely useless.
>
> Consider the supersonic, long-range bomber that the Air Force built and
> put in place briefly, before intercontinental missiles made it both
> obsolete and too expensive to justify maintaining. It looked cool, like an
> SST with hinged wings that would droop at the ends at high speed when it
> becomes important for the wings to NOT generate lift. It is one of the very
> few aircraft in history to exceed Mach 3. Now? Maybe there's one or two in
> a museum somewhere, but the rest are probably sitting in a military
> junkyard in a desert somewhere, partly stripped, corroding, awaiting a
> future age for archeologists to dig it up and wonder what it was, like a
> dinosaur, slowly sinking into a tar pit.
>
> Or the Apple Newton. It was a brilliant idea that so many man-hours and so
> much money went into at a time when the end result could not live up to the
> expected functionality because of limits in the technology that could not
> be foreseen until the whole thing was assembled and tested by the public.
> Apple mass produced a thing that nobody wanted, and they couldn't know that
> nobody wanted it until they produced it.
>
> Or Windows Compact Edition: The all-time prize winner in terms of its
> acronym: WinCE. It actually was sold with that acronym. What were they
> thinking?
>
> For software, it can refer to badly written modules of code that need to
> be replaced before the whole software package can be properly functional,
> or modules that were well adapted to earlier versions of the software, but
> now because of feature shift or changing standards, it no longer functions
> well in the software package and need to be replaced or removed, or it can
> refer to complex and unnecessary codes in documents, as in the junk that MS
> Word puts in a document when converting it into a Web page.
>
> These are not simple leftovers. This is not simple garbage or debris.
> These are things carefully constructed by misguided hands and minds, often
> lacking sufficient context at time of construction to comprehend why it
> would be so poorly adapted to the future it will become a part of. It's
> quite often expensive to create and difficult to remove.
>
> It's geek poetry, not simple landfill material to be handled by a scullery
> maid.
>
> cruft.
>
> It's the tech version of Darwin's losers. When it was born, it couldn't
> know that it couldn't compete. They figured it was worth a try, right?
>
> I'm sticking to it. I want a word for cruft.
>
> lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
> Retired Door Repair Guy
>
> > On Nov 19, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Felix Malmenbeck <felixm at kth.se> wrote:
> >
> > chaq Qap «DI chuv», «lI'Ha'pu'wI'», «lI'wI' Deq» joq.
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > From: Alan Anderson [qunchuy at alcaco.net]
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 20:17
> > To: tlhIngan Hol mailing list
> > Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Need a word for ...
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:05 PM,  <lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I have a new favorite word in English, and I really want an equivalent
> in Klingon:
> >>
> >> cruft
> >>
> >> If we have words for scalene triangle, we need a word for cruft.
> >> It's such a glorious, perfect word for the warrior's tongue.
> >
> > qechvaD Qap <DI> qar'a'? veQ 'oHbe'law'. rut 'ut. vI' neH.
> >
> > -- ghunchu'wI'
> >
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