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crawling horror
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crawling horror /n./ Ancient crufty hardware or software that
is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the
hackers at a site. Like dusty deck or gonkulator, but
connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an
active menace to health and sanity. "Mostly we code new stuff in
C, but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from
nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." Compare
WOMBAT.
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