cruft
cruft /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An
unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers
under your bed is
cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking
it with a
broom only produces more. 2. n. The results
of shoddy
construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun
on `hand craft']
To write assembler code for something normally (and
better) done by
a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess;
superfluous
junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code.
5. [University
of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is
to geese; that
is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers".
This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no
one is sure of
its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is
a Cruft Hall at
Harvard University which is part of the old physics
building; it's
said to have been the physics department's radar lab
during WWII.
To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be
full of random
techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may
well have coined the
term as a knock on the competition.
Lifted directly from:
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/cruft.HTML