:like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj. Describes a slow,
difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous
quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's
mainframe OSes. "Well, you *could* write a C compiler in
COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach."
See also {fear and loathing}
:like nailing jelly to a tree: adj. Used to describe a task thought
to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from
poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain.
"Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs
that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree,
because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means algorithmically."
:line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notational line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that *somebody* is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size."
:line eater, the: [USENET] n. 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the `line eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there *was* a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food *and* the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater' continued for some time after the bug had been {nailed to the wall}, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself is still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line eater}.
:line noise: n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to
electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232
serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections,
interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms,
{cosmic rays}, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone
wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like
the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is
theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax
so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes,
there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is {TECO};
it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable
from line noise." Other non-{WYSIWYG} editors, such as Multics
`qed' and Unix `ed', in the hands of a real hacker, also
qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as
{INTERCAL}.
:line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve, `2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlike `line feed', `line starve' is *not* standard {{ASCII}} terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well as nroff/troff) that suppresses a {newline} or other character(s) that would normally be emitted.
:link farm: [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when (for example) one is maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree, e.g., when the only difference is architecture-dependent object files. "Let's freeze the source and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms." Link farms may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of `-I' (include-file directory) arguments on older C preprocessors. However, they can also get completely out of hand, becoming the filesystem equivalent of {spaghetti code}.
:link-dead: [MUD] adj. Said of a {MUD} character who has frozen in place because of a dropped Internet connection.
:lint: [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named for the bits of fluff it picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a program closely for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if the UNIX utility `lint(1)' is used. This term used to be restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself, but (judging by references on USENET) it has become a shorthand for {desk check} at some non-UNIX shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v. {delint}. 2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in "this draft has too much lint".
:lion food: [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (by extension,
administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two
lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their
chances but agreed to meet after 2 months. When they finally
meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says:
"How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out
a small army to chase me —- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since
then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The
fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a
manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"