Cruft
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- For the dog show, see Crufts
In hacker jargon, cruft is redundant, old or improperly written code which needs to be fixed, but tends to stick around. Large software projects invariably accumulate cruft. The concept can be compared to Philip K. Dick's idea of kipple. Cruft is sometimes said to be the software equivalent of dust bunnies.
Software engineering methods like "Extreme Programming" aim to prevent the accumulation of code cruft by continuous refactoring.
Cruft may also refer to useless junk or excess materials (including obsolete computer hardware) that build up over time and have no value.
In MIT slang, "cruft" has also come to refer to people who spend a lot of time at MIT even though they are no longer a student there.
Although the origins of this term are uncertain, it is suggested that the term is derived from Harvard's Cruft Hall, which was the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during WWII. As late as the early nineties, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of Cruft Hall's windows. This image of "undiscarded technical clutter" quickly migrated from hardware to software, from which it was even more mind-bogglingly difficult to remove.
External links
- Cruft (http://www.jargon.org/html/C/cruft.html) at the Jargon File
- In the Beginning...was the Command Line (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html) long article by Neal Stephenson which includes insightful coverage of the "cruft" concept.