JargonFile/entries/Good Thing.txt
2014-04-26 15:52:28 +01:00

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Good Thing
n.,adj. [very common; always pronounced as if capitalized. Orig. fr. the 1930 Sellar Yeatman parody of British history 1066 And All That , but well-established among hackers in the U.S. as well.] 1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice: A language that manages dynamic memory automatically for you is a Good Thing. 2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later: Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing. 3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in YACC is a Good Thing , specifically connotes that the thing has drastically reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose Bad Thing.