Related:

• eligious issues: n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off {holy wars}
  uch as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?...
• holy wars: [from {USENET}, but may predate it] n. {flame war}s over {religious issues}.
  The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms {big-endian} and {little-endian} in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace"....
• brute force adj. Describes a primitive programming style
  one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
• ITS /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab.
  Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `an ITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort....
• bigot n. [common] A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see religious issues).
  Usually found with a specifier; thus, `cray bigot', `ITS bigot', `APL bigot', `VMS bigot', `Berkeley bigot'....
• bigot: n. A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see {religious issues}).
  Usually found with a specifier; thus, `cray bigot', `ITS bigot', `APL bigot', `VMS bigot', `Berkeley bigot'....
• TECO /tee'koh/ n.,v. obs. 1. [originally an acronym for `[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector'
  later, `Text Editor and COrrector'] n. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody....
• bug n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp.
  one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature....
• alk mode n. A feature supported by Unix, ITS, and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation.
  It combines the immediacy of talking with all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails....