Related:

• cargo cult programming: n. A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.
  A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming})....
• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.
  So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists....
• ain dance: n. 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished.
  This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc....
• and I realized, we did not live in a scientific society.
  -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "Cargo cult science...
• voodoo programming: [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n.
  The use by guess or cookbook of an {obscure} or {hairy} system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand....
• bug n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp.
  one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature....
• 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....
• wave a dead chicken: v. To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended.
  I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug....
• mash the stack: [C programming] n. To corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end of a local array or other data structure.
  Code that smashes the stack can cause a return from the routine to jump to a random address, resulting in some of the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind....