JargonFile/entries/kluge.txt

kluge

/klooj/ [from the German klug , clever; poss. related to Polish Russian
klucz (a key, a hint, a main point)] 1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath
Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. 2. n. A clever
programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient,
if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery
and verges on being a crock. 3. n. Something that works for the wrong
reason. 4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. I've kluged this routine to
get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way. 5. [WPI] n. A
feature that is implemented in a rude manner. Nowadays this term is often
encountered in the variant spelling kludge. Reports from old farts are
consistent that kluge was the original spelling, reported around computers
as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware
kluges. In 1947, the New York Folklore Quarterly reported a classic
shaggy-dog story Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker then current in the Armed
Forces, in which a kluge was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial
function. Other sources report that kluge was common Navy slang in the WWII
era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently
failed at sea. However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a
decade older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a
device called a Kluge paper feeder , an adjunct to mechanical printing
presses. Legend has it that the Kluge feeder was designed before small,
cheap electric motors and control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly
complex assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power and
synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It was
accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly
difficult to repair but oh, so clever! People who tell this story also aver
that Kluge was the name of a design engineer. There is in fact a Brandtjen
Kluge Inc., an old family business that manufactures printing equipment
interestingly, their name is pronounced /kloogee/ ! Henry Brandtjen,
president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded
by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloogee/ , who built and
co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen
claims, however, that this was a simple device (with only four cams); he
says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold. Other
correspondents differ with Mr. Brandtjen's history of the device and his
allegation that it was a simple rather than complex one, but agree that the
Kluge automatic feeder was the most likely source of the folklore. TMRC and
the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu
that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also foobar ).
It seems likely that kluge came to MIT via alumni of the many military
electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during the war. The
variant kludge was apparently popularized by the Datamation article
mentioned under kludge ; it was titled How to Design a Kludge (February
1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain,
where kludge has an independent history (though this fact was largely
unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate
in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition
versions of this entry; everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation
of kluge ). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology
of their own kludge when kluge crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by
lobbing the kludge orthography in the other direction and confusing their
American cousins' spelling! The result of this history is a tangle. Many
younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly
for its meaning and pronunciation, as kludge. (Phonetically, consider huge,
refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and
fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly
consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/
orally, use it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent.
European hackers have mostly learned the word from written American sources
and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning! Some
observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's meaning.