WhatIs

/kräk/

[from the obvious mainstream scatologism]

n. 

/ker'l*f/, sometimes /kru'l*f/ or /C-R-L-F/

n. (often capitalized as 'CRLF') A carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line.

See newline, terpri.

Under UNIX influence this usage has become less common (UNIX uses a bare line feed as its 'CRLF').

/kri-ti-kəl mas/

n. In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus epsilon bugs. When software achieves critical mass, it can only be discarded and rewritten.

/kri-pəlwer/

n. 

1. Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version.
2. [Cambridge] Guiltware that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare careware).
3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper).

/kret'n-*s/ or /kreet'n-*s/

adj. Wrong; stupid; non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of people. 

See dread high-bit disease for an example. 

Approximate synonyms: bletcherous, bagbiting (see bagbiter), losing, brain-damaged.

/kret'n/ or /kree'tn/

n. Congenital loser; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do anything right. It has been observed that many American hackers tend to favor the British pronunciation /kre'tn/ over standard American /kree'tn/; it is thought this may be due to the insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

/kree'ping fee'-chr-i:'t*s/

n. Variant of creeping featurism, with its own spoonerization: 'feeping creaturitis'. Some people like to reserve this form for the disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, as opposed to the lurking general tendency in designers' minds. (After all, -ism means 'condition' or 'pursuit of', whereas -itis usually means 'inflammation of'.)

/kree'ping fee'chr-izm/

n. 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed.

See also feeping creaturism.

"You know, the main problem with BSD UNIX has always been creeping featurism."

/krē-piŋ e-li-gən(t)s/

n. Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become elegant past the point of diminishing return. This often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed important in the Real World.

See also creeping featurism, second-system effect, tense.

/krē-ˈā-shə-ˌni-zəm/

n. The (false) belief that large, innovative designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population -- and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong.