Jargon File Editorial Philosophy

[Eric S. Raymond]

There's been a good bit of criticism of my editorial decisions in re the
new Jargon File lately. I want to make clear to all parties that (despite
my mildly aggrieved-sounding posting about the MULTICS/anti-MULTICS crossfire)
I welcome this debate and would like to encourage more of it.

I am really trying in this project to act as an instrument of the hacker
community at large; I consider that my job is not to create but to distill.
As such, the feedback I get on alt.folklore.computers and via email is very
important to me and *does* shape my decisions and policies. If this has not
already been obvious, I hope it will become so in the next release.

I write this to share with all of you some of the global issues that I think
recent discussions of specifics have been pointing at, and to make known
my thinking on them. Reply, commentary, support, criticism, persuasion, and
(yes) flames are invited in reply (on issues like these, even the fools and
flamers have a story to tell...:-)).

<OPEN ISSUES BEGIN HERE>

ISSUE #1: THE PAST VS. THE PRESENT

The overriding problem that keeps re-manifesting in different guises is the
tension between the Jargon File as a window into current usage and attitudes
and the Jargon File as a record of `old-time' hacker tradition.

The world has changed a lot since 1983, the date of the last major revision.
Hackerdom has changed with it. The PDP-10 and ITS and the ARPANET are dead.
TECO is a historical relic. The relatively narrow MIT/Stanford/CMU/RPI base
of the old hacker culture has broadened out to include the UNIX community
it once looked down on, and has gone international as well (three days ago
I got a note from Vadim Antonov in Moscow that casually mentioned how
Russian hacker slang had been much influenced by the old jargon file after
1985!).

I've spent a lot of thought and effort on how to deal with this. I've decided
that I have to come down on the side of current usage, even though that means
doing things that annoy other old-timers like moving the dead PDP-10 slang to
an appendix so it won't clutter up the main body. For those who want a
historical document, jargon-1 is out there.

I think it would betray the hacker spirit to shackle the Jargon File to its
past. I want today's budding hackers to be able to dive into it and learn
about the culture as it exists *today*. I want to set a precedent for some
bright-eyed youngster around the year 2000 to be able to honorably retire
some of the slang *I* added from his/her version 3 for the excellent reason
that it's no longer `live'.

I've tried to be respectful of history, though. I couldn't bring myself to
simply drop *anything* from jargon.1; it would have seemed like sacrilege.
That's why there *is* now an appendix B. Also, I haven't been fanatical
about excising the old ITS-based examples and some of the MIT-o-centric
assumptions. Wherever these seemed to yield additional `flavor' I've left
them in.

And, in many entries, I've tried to give some indication of how hacker
attitudes have evolved over time. Thus (for example) the DESERVE TO LOSE
example now trashes MS-DOS, with a note that ITS fans used to say this
of UNIX (it would have been unsporting to point out that those old ITSers are
now mostly UNIX partisans themselves, and I didn't).

In sum, it seems to me better to have an appendix for `dead' slang than to
nuke it altogether or to compromise what I see as the primary mission of
describing `live' hacker culture. Now, I'm certainly willing to listen to
arguments about what should or should not be considered dead. General policy
on this is the same as for new entries; I prefer to have two independent
reports of `live' usage but will settle for one plus my own experience.

ISSUE #2: LEXICON OR ENCYCLOPEDIA?

Another (and subtler) problem is organizational. Should the File be strictly
a lexicon, or more in the nature of an encyclopedia? Right now, material
on the culture that doesn't fit the lexicon format is divided between entries
like ORIENTAL FOOD, MUSIC, and HACKER HUMOR (on the one hand) and appendices
(on the other). There's also more `encyclopedic' stuff I'm intending to merge
in, like a revised and expanded version of the `Portrait of J. Random Hacker'
I posted here a while back.

So this problem is going to become more acute. On the one hand, there's a
certain esthetic and historical appeal to sticking close to a pure lexicon
style; on the other hand, this means proliferating appendices like crazy if
I want to include even the breadth of stuff that's already in, and that's
klugey. And this leads straight to...

ISSUE #3: INCLUDE MORE FOLKLORE?

There's lots of stuff out there (like the ThingKing spoof, the story of
Mel the Real Programmer, the DEC WARS/UNIX WARS postings, etc. etc.) that
would offer humorous insights into hacker culture. Stuff that's hard to
find. Guy Steele even wants to include the entire INTERCAL manual!

What do I do about this kind of material? Include it in appendices? (That
might cause the already-large on-line version of the jargon file to bloat
unnacceptably). Include it in the paper version only and run a folklore mail
server on snark? Forget it because it opens up too big a can of worms?

ISSUE #4: PROPER-NAME ENTRIES

Some jargon-file entries refer to the user or full names of hackers who are
now or were at some time famous. I have a couple problems with this. One is
that the email addresses they site may be obsolescent; neither I nor the
reader has any way to know, and is it appropriate to publish dangling pointers?
Another problem is that these people were bigger frogs in smaller ponds than
the File is now aimed at -- of major stature within, say, MIT, but not really
well known outside it.

So I want to remove such entries. The type case is the personal names listed
under QUUX. Is it really of continuing interest that some gentleman named
Alan P. Swide was once known as `The Mediocre QUUX'?

The `Dave Lebling' entry under PDL makes another troubling example. I mean,
this guy helped write ZORK; he probably qualifies as at least culture-hero,
if not actual DEMIGOD. But is it really interesting or useful in the Jargon
File's new context to be reminded that he was once known as pdl?

However, I also do not want to be seen seen as arbitrarily cutting people off
from whatever share of notoriety they justly earned. Am I going to be flamed
if I drop these entries? More importantly, am I going to *deserve* to be
flamed?

This question has a sharper bite for me than it might because I'd already
had more influence on the culture than most even before I started editing
the file. I am the author of the fairly infamous UNIX WARS spoof, the
originator of the term `BONDAGE & DISCIPLINE LANGUAGE', the implementor of
C-INTERCAL, one of the senior nethack developers, and designer of a popular
netnews suite (among many other things); it's difficult for me to avoid having
a presence in the jargon file and a personal connection to a lot of entries.
The *last* thing I want to do (or be thought to be doing) is crowd anybody else
out of the limelight.

What do all of you on the net think I should do about this?

<END OF OPEN ISSUES>

Finally, I want to again thank everybody who has contributed to the file and to
the debate over its purposes, form and contents. I sincerely hope you will
all continue to do so even if my editorial decisions don't sit perfectly
with you. I'd like to please everybody, but that's not possible and wouldn't
reflect good judgement if it were. I do want continuing support and correction
from as wide a range of hacker-culture sources as I can get, so that the Jargon
File will present as true and inspiring and humorous a portrait of hackerdom
as it possibly can.
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond = eric at snark.thyrsus.com  (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)