WhatIs

/wi-zi-wig/

adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What You Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands which do not result in immediate visual feedback. The term can be mildly derogatory, as it is often used to refer to dumbed-down user-friendly interfaces targeted at non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands.

/w-w-w/

Birth of a Global Information Network

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, emerged as a revolutionary concept in the late 20th century, transforming the way we access and share information. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, is credited with inventing the WWW in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Berners-Lee's innovative idea involved creating a system of interconnected hypertext documents, accessible through the Internet.

/wəgə wəgə/

n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task.

Compare cruncha cruncha cruncha, grind (sense 4).

/rȯŋ thiŋ/

n. A design, action, or decision that is clearly incorrect or inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized in speech as if capitalized. The opposite of the Right Thing; more generally, anything that is not the Right Thing. In cases where the good is the enemy of the best, the merely good -- although good -- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing.

"In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing."

/rīt ōn-lē mem-rē/

n. The obvious antonym to read-only memory. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information.

/rīt ōn-lē laŋ-gwij/

n. A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is write-only code. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though INTERCAL and TECO certainly deserve it more.

/rīt ōn-lē kōd/

[a play on read-only memory]

n. Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her.

A Bad Thing.

/rap ə-rau̇nd/

vi. (also n. wraparound and v. shorthand wrap) 

/wünd ə-rau̇nd t͟hə ak-səl/

adj. In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.

/wərm/

[from tapeworm in John Brunner's novel The Shockwave Rider, via XEROX PARC]

n. A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes.

Compare virus.

Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only crackers write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's Internet Worm of 1988, a benign one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S.