[PD] [OT] Re: about sexism

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Mon Oct 8 17:41:41 CEST 2007


Hallo,
Chuckk Hubbard hat gesagt: // Chuckk Hubbard wrote:

> Addendum - a quick Gmail search turned up one use of "gang bang" which was
> quoted in response a few times; it was in the thread "[Pd]
> pd-competition?".  I'm not exactly sure what it was referring to.  I suspect
> it was a play on the word 'bang'.

Gang Bang has multiple meanings. Besides the vulgar one (which seems
to be the only one, the all knowing Wikipedia knows about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_bang_%28disambiguation%29 ) there
also is a meaning in hacker slang, which is what the pd competition
was alluding to.

Quoting the Jargon file entry: 

  gang bang: 
  
  The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an
  attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short
  time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that
  over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers),
  and large numbers of loosely-coupled programmers operating in bazaar
  mode can do very useful work when they're not on a deadline, most
  are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet unrealistic
  deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code
  entirely lacking in orthogonality. When market-driven managers make
  a list of all the features the competition has and assign one
  programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a
  coherent (or even functional) design goes to epsilon. See also
  firefighting, Mongolian Hordes technique, Conway's Law. 

Of course, hacker slang can be sexist as well, even racist if you look
at the term " Mongolian Hordes technique" above. But well, that's
slang, one wouldn't use it in church.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__




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