26 lines
3.6 KiB
HTML
26 lines
3.6 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>hairy</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../H.html" title="H"/><link rel="previous" href="hairball.html" title="hairball"/><link rel="next" href="HAKMEM.html" title="HAKMEM"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">hairy</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="hairball.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">H</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="HAKMEM.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="hairy"/><dt xmlns="" id="hairy"><b>hairy</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">adj.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> 1. Annoyingly complicated. “<span class="quote"><a href="../D/DWIM.html"><i class="glossterm">DWIM</i></a> is
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incredibly hairy.</span>” </p></dd><dd><p> 2. Incomprehensible. “<span class="quote"><a href="../D/DWIM.html"><i class="glossterm">DWIM</i></a> is
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incredibly hairy.</span>” </p></dd><dd><p> 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or
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incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: “<span class="quote">He knows this
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hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about.</span>” See also
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<a href="hirsute.html"><i class="glossterm">hirsute</i></a>.</p></dd><dd><p>There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that
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any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at least in a point.
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Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term
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‘hairy’ with the informal version of this theorem; “<span class="quote">You
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can't comb a hairy ball smooth.</span>” (Previous versions of this entry
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associating the above informal statement with the Brouwer fixed-point
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theorem were incorrect.)</p><p>The adjective ‘long-haired’ is well-attested to have been
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in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was
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equivalent to modern <span class="firstterm">hairy</span> senses 1
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and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun
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‘long-hair’ was at the time used to describe a person
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satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair
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was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving
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hackish <span class="firstterm">hairy</span> as a sort of stunted
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mutant relic.</p><p>In British mainstream use, “<span class="quote">hairy</span>” means
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“<span class="quote">dangerous</span>”, and consequently, in British programming terms,
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“<span class="quote">hairy</span>” may be used to denote complicated and/or
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incomprehensible code, but only if that complexity or incomprehesiveness is
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also considered dangerous.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="hairball.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../H.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="HAKMEM.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">hairball </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> HAKMEM</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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