Your vocabulary word for today...

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

Eric Walker - 10 Nov 2006 01:34 GMT

>From the _Scientific American_ web-site blog series of live entries

from the 1st annual World Science Forum, "Marvin Minsky - Artificial
Intelligence" (9 November)--

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=liveblog_marvin_minsky_artificial_intell&m
ore=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&ref=rss

--quote without comment:

"And he blames our failure to invent such things on a number of
bugaboos: the declining numbers of American students pursuing basic
research (for which he cites no statistics, but I've written about it
previously, here), the death of the big private labs (like Bell labs)
and the craptacularity of modern programming languages."

Reply to this Message

Oleg Lego - 10 Nov 2006 05:58 GMT

The Eric Walker entity posted thusly:

>>From the _Scientific American_ web-site blog series of live entries
>from the 1st annual World Science Forum, "Marvin Minsky - Artificial
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
>previously, here), the death of the big private labs (like Bell labs)
>and the craptacularity of modern programming languages."

Nice! Spectacularly crappy?

Reply to this Message

Evan Kirshenbaum - 10 Nov 2006 16:57 GMT

> The Eric Walker entity posted thusly:
>
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
>
> Nice! Spectacularly crappy?

The adjective it's based on appears to have been popularized by
(perhaps coined in) the _Simpsons_ episode, "Miracle on Evergreen
Terrace", which aired 12/21/1997.

Signature

Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |"The Dynamics of Interbeing and
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |Monological Imperatives in 'Dick
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |and Jane' : A Study in Psychic
|Transrelational Modes."
kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com | Calvin
(650)857-7572

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/

Reply to this Message

Eric Walker - 10 Nov 2006 23:56 GMT

[...]

> Nice! Spectacularly crappy?

The page at--

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Transwiki:Craptacular

--shows several senses, all closely related. The one in which it was
used in the original quotation here would be:

"In Software development

"Craptacular is often applied to exceptionally horrible code. Code
needn't be literally incorrect to be 'craptacular'; merely being
excessively ugly and inefficient is often enough."

Reply to this Message

Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

Your vocabulary word for today...