2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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crawling horror
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by
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forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like dusty deck or
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gonkulator , but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation
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but an active menace to health and sanity. Mostly we code new stuff in C,
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but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from
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nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror.... Compare WOMBAT. This
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usage is almost certainly derived from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.
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Lovecraft may never have used the exact phrase crawling horror in his
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writings, but one of the fearsome Elder Gods that he wrote extensively about
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was Nyarlethotep, who had as an epithet The Crawling Chaos. Certainly the
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extreme, even melodramatic horror of his characters at the weird monsters
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they encounter, even to the point of going insane with fear, is what hackers
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are referring to with this phrase when they use it for horribly bad code.
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Compare cthulhic.
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