JargonFile/entries/hairy.txt

hairy

adj. 1. Annoyingly complicated. DWIM is incredibly hairy. 2.
Incomprehensible. DWIM is incredibly hairy. 3. Of people, high-powered,
authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except
in context: He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry
about. See also hirsute. There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory
which states that any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at
least in a point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term
hairy with the informal version of this theorem; You can't comb a hairy ball
smooth. (Previous versions of this entry associating the above informal
statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were incorrect.) The
adjective long-haired is well-attested to have been in slang use among
scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern
hairy senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In
fact the noun long-hair was at the time used to describe a person satisfying
sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted
as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a
sort of stunted mutant relic. In British mainstream use, hairy means
dangerous , and consequently, in British programming terms, hairy may be
used to denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that
complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.