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The New Hacker’s Dictionary edited by Eric S. Raymond with assistance
and illustrations by Guy L. Steele Jr, MIT Press, pp 433, £22.50
hbk, £9.95 pbk

Hack language is an Esperanto nightmare. Although constructed for apparently
functional purposes, the vocabulary, of hacking rather than being merely
positivist and exact, is a slangy, subjective composite of Yiddishisms,
sci-fi, high-tech, comics, 1950s white-coat science, hippymumble, Zen and
linguistic grammar games; a kind of amended Valley talk for the antiauthoritarian
and unfashionable – perfect, in other words, for conversing just one screen
to another. Who could doubt hackers need a dictionary?

Well, they’ve got one (an update on the 1983 version, actually) and
bulletproof (‘capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception
condition’) it is. From abbrev to zorkmid, here is everything you wanted
to know about SEX (Software EXchange) but were afraid to ASCII (American
Standard Code for Information Exchange). The definitions are swift and witty,
accompanied by anecdotes from urban computer mythology, together with a
generous helping of surprisingly reflexive and accurate cultural selfanalysis.

Appendix B’s ‘Portrait of J. Random Hacker’, for example, confesses
that ‘hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with
other people’. Still, why worry? The real world might be bogus and bagbiting,
but in the green of the screen everything’s flavourful, bytexexual and even
elegant. As artificial languages go, this is as supple as the best of them
and with the moby New Hacker’s Dictionary as a guise, you can spend all
your time being cognitocious and skiffy (all right, I patched those up).

Andrew Clifford is a freelance writer.