:Lions Book: /n./ "Source Code and Commentary on Unix level 6", by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the Unix Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976—77, and were, for years after, the *only* detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions Book was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early Unix hackers.
[1996 update: The Lions book lives again! It will finally see legal public print as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 from Peer-To-Peer Communications, with a forward by Dennis Ritchie.]
:LISP: /n./ [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other {HLL} still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now shares the throne with {C}. See {languages of choice}.
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing".
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages, such as {COBOL} and {Ada}, are full of unnecessary {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer languages.
:list-bomb: /v./ To {mailbomb} someone by forging
messages causing the victim to become a subscriber to many mailing
lists. This is a self-defeating tactic; it merely forces mailing
list servers to require confirmation by return message for every
subscription.
:literature, the: /n./ Computer-science journals and other
publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the
speaker believes is {trivial}. Thus, one might answer an
annoying question by saying "It's in the literature." Oppose
{Knuth}, which has no connotation of triviality.
:lithium lick: /n./ [NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have
gotten too much attention from their esteemed founder are said to
have `lithium lick' when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor
and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal conversation —-
for example, "It just works, right out of the box!"
:little-endian: /adj./ Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored `little-end-first'). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. See {big-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte.
:live: /li:v/ /adj.,adv./ Opposite of `test'. Refers to actual real-world data or a program working with it. For example, the response to "I think the record deleter is finished" might be "Is it live yet?" or "Have you tried it out on live data?" This usage usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a more appropriate response might be: "Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it." The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a haywire record-deleter running amok live would probably cause great harm.