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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Meh. A record that doesn't evolve is dead; ESR gets a lot of criticism for his stewardship but I'll take a Jargon File that updates over one that doesn't any day

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The site maintainer for the 1988 verion, Paul Dourish, gives a counterargument in his preface ('...Unfortunately, in the process, [Raymond] essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical...'). At the very least, the 1988 version is livelier.

For more amusing grumpiness, see The Unix Hater's Handbook:

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Here is the archive for the Unix Hater's mailing list: http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/

Download it and, in the first half of the (long) archive, you will find the users raising holy hell at Eric S. Raymond for what he was doing to the Jargon File at the time.

Raymond had changed the anti-Unix jokes, substituting MS-DOS for Unix in each case. The users of the mailing list would have been happy with Raymond coming up with original anti-Microsoft jokes, but were justifiably angry at Raymond for re-writing history.

I don't have quite as bad an opinion of Eric S. Raymond as do some people around here. In particular, his idea of Kafka trapping is insightful ( http://0-esr.ibiblio.org.librus.hccs.edu/?p=2122 ). I do note the irony of a libertarian who gripes at the distortions of the mainstream media having done a bit of media distortion of his own.

I'm torn, because while ESR did add a lot of emphasis on Unix/C culture (which is very important in hacker history), the last five or ten years he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.

...he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.

And terms of his own devising that haven't caught on. That seems like the cardinal sin of a lexicographer.

I disagree. Yes, this record is out of date and that limits its utility today as a decoding tool. However, its historical value is high because it is out of date.

I found it interesting to go through it and look at which usages had survived and which hadn't.

Exactly. Also, it is or should be obvious that its an historical artefact, and there for has important value, and not seen as something useful today. Although, it could be.

Oh I dunno, Rumours is still a great record.

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