JargonFile/entries/trivial.txt

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2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
trivial
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3.
Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly
cretinous would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already
solved (some claim that hackish trivial usually evaluates to I've seen it
before ). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those
of non-hackers. See nontrivial , uninteresting. The physicist Richard
Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay Los
Alamos From Below in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ), defined trivial
theorem as one that has already been proved.