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