crawling horror

n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by
forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like dusty deck or
gonkulator , but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation
but an active menace to health and sanity. Mostly we code new stuff in C,
but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from
nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror.... Compare WOMBAT. This
usage is almost certainly derived from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft may never have used the exact phrase crawling horror in his
writings, but one of the fearsome Elder Gods that he wrote extensively about
was Nyarlethotep, who had as an epithet The Crawling Chaos. Certainly the
extreme, even melodramatic horror of his characters at the weird monsters
they encounter, even to the point of going insane with fear, is what hackers
are referring to with this phrase when they use it for horribly bad code.
Compare cthulhic.

