2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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crufty
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/kruhftee/ , adj. [very common; origin unknown; poss. from crusty or cruddy
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] 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The canonical example is This is
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standard old crufty DEC software. In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin
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of crufty holds that was originally a mutation of crusty applied to DEC
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software so old that the s characters were tall and skinny, looking more
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like f characters. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with
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encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup.
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3. Generally unpleasant. 4. (sometimes spelled cruftie ) n. A small crufty
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object (see frob ); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of
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things. A LISP property list is a good place to store crufties (or,
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collectively, random cruft). This term is one of the oldest in the jargon
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and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a
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Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building;
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it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To
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this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk.
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MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the
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competition.
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