The New Hacker's Dictionary

In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a Good Thing, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see ill-behaved). There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing the application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing well are held in high regard.

barf /barf/ n.,v.

[common; from mainstream slang meaning 'vomit']

1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See bletch.

2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he literally vomited.

3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps not. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old one." See choke, gag. In Commonwealth Hackish, 'barf' is generally replaced by 'puke' or 'vom'. barf is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.

barfmail // n.

Multiple bounce messages accumulating to the level of serious annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky.

barfulation /bar'fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj.

Variation of barf used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?"

barfulous /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj.

(alt. 'barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.