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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

The Raku language (formerly Perl 6) community also has its share of idioms, abbreviations (not just technical) and phrases. I'm not sure if they are exclusive to this community, or also used elsewhere.

Examples:

In the early days, many features were specified by Not Yet Implemented, so NYI became its own term.

Error messages are meant to be awesome, so anything "Less Than Awesome" (LTA) was considered a bug.

Larry Wall didn't like the term "void context", so he invented "sink context" instead (with all the puns related to it, of course).

There were many more, though I have a hard time coming up with a longer list...

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Perl has a history of this due to Larry Wall's background in linguistics. His Christian faith is also an influence. In Perl you can "bless" a reference to reify it into a class. The name Perl also comes from the bible apparently. Though you probably know this based on your username...

Fortunately Perl was reasonable. On the other side of the spectrum you have the impenetrable and pretentiously obnoxious Urbit[1]

[1] https://urbit.org/docs/glossary/moon

Oh, hey, they have a glossary now. That's at least a nice affordance. Back when I last looked at Urbit you were expected to figure everything out like you were reading a cyberpunk novel.

...actually, now that I say it, "cyberpunk enthusiast" kinda resonates with the whole design of Urbit.

Urbit's documentation is like the Codex Seraphinianus but less understandable.

This is my first visit to Urbit... I feel like I stumbled into a parallel dimension. Currently transfixing me: The "Hoon syntax" page gives one-syllable pronunciations for all the ASCII punctuation chars. Wat.

https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/hoon-school/hoon-syntax

Geez, this seems like if Timecube was opensourced on GitHub. Is it a serious project or a parody?

It's as serious as Perl, but where joining the Perl community turns you into Ned Flanders, it's meant to turn you into a pro-monarchy NRX guy.

You might need therapy after, but whenever I've met someone who can't stop saying things like "grok" and "less than awesome" I've always thought they needed whatever the opposite of therapy is. They're so well adjusted you can't stand being near them.

NRX = neo-reactionary, for those not up to date with the latest political affiliation acronyms.

thanks, you saved me an urbandictionary visit. :P

bless is also a unix tool https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/8/BLESS/

It predates this from earlier verisons of Mac OS. This was a "Mac OS" tool before it was a Mac OSX CLI tool.

> In this lesson we introduce the notion of a vane, which should be thought of as a kernel module for Arvo (if you don't know what that means yet, just keep reading)

> Following this lesson, we will introduce Gall, a vane used to build user space apps. Then we have a walkthrough where we construct an egg timer as a Gall app that interacts with Behn.

nods Gall is a vane that uses Behn, which is an Arvo kernel module. Got it. Crystal clear.

> Here we see that wind produces a wet gate that takes in two molds, which for the move type for Behn are notes and gifts. When a vane needs to request something of another vane, it %passes a note. When a vane produces a result that was requested, it %gives a gift to the callee.

I thought the etymology of "NYI" was more-or-less the same as "NIH" (not invented here) - namely, that it came out of Bell Labs somewhere along the line

...or, at least, that's what my CS prof claimed in the late 90s :)

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