[Ads-l] "kludgy, adj." - Word of the Day from the OED

[Andy Bach]

> An IBM executive once volunteered a somewhat more elegant definition,
to wit, "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming
a distressing whole."

When I learned of "kludge" in CompSci in the late 70s and to this day,
it means something like that.   A quick fix that is inelegant,
wasteful and ugly, tacking on a chunk of code to handle one "corner
case" problem which, however, works (so, unlike a "monkey fix" which
is much the same, but merely pushes the problem elsewhere, rather than
fixing it), rather than taking a longer approach and
finding/understanding the underlying mistake and fixing that.  You
write a kludge or kludge in some code (nobody ever used
"kludgification") because you're lazy or the program needs to work
today. The better fix comes in version 2.0

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 9:59 PM ADSGarson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Another word of enormous importance derived from "kludge" is
> "kludgification". This self-illustrative word appeared in an
> advertisement in "The New Yorker" in 1973. Shortly afterwards the word
> mavens  William and Mary Morris received an inquiry. The Morris's
> definition for "kludge"  is a not quite right (in my opinion), but the
> IBM executive's comment is entertaining.
>
> Date: November 26, 1973
> Newspaper: The New Yorker
> Article: Advertisement for book "Malice in Blunderland" by Thomas L. Martin Jr.
> Quote Page 193, Column 2
> Database: archives.newyorker.com
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> Martin's masterpiece invokes the Finagle Factor, Kalan's Corollary,
> Rosenzweig's Rubric, Wilson's Law (Flip, that is)—and many other major
> theoretical breakthroughs—to demonstrate definitively why every
> bureaucracy tends inexorably toward complete kludgification and
> ultimate stasis.
> [End excerpt]
>
>
> Date: February 1, 1974
> Newspaper: Paterson News
> Newspaper Location: Paterson, New Jersey
> Article: Words, Wit, And Wisdom
> Author: William and Mary Morris
> Quote Page 35, Column 8
> Database: Newspapers.com
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> DEAR MORRISES: An article in a recent issue of the New Yorker used the
> word "kludgification." This word is not in any dictionary I have
> available. Would you care to comment? -- Mrs. A.H. Johnson, Watertown,
> Conn.
>
> A -- We tracked down "kludge" a few years ago and included it in
> Volume III of our Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (Harper &
> Row). It's a word popular among computer programmers and means an
> absolute mess, a complete foul-up. It's pronounced KLOOJ, by the way.
> An IBM executive once volunteered a somewhat more elegant definition,
> to wit, "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming
> a distressing whole." Obviously, then, "kludgification" would be the
> process of creating a kludge. All clear now?
> [End excerpt]
>
> Garson
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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a

Andy Bach,
afbach at gmail.com
608 658-1890 cell
608 261-5738 wk

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