4 lines
883 B
Plaintext
4 lines
883 B
Plaintext
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TANSTAAFL
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/tanstahfl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. ] There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch , often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work! Well, TANSTAAFL you know. This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see Appendix B for discussion). Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL ( There is No Such Thing... ) is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952 in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen from it by mutation.
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