"Others use it to describe a particularly elegant hack"

I have heard kluge used as just the opposite, a "klugy" solution is sloppy and awkward.

Programming has many wonderful words and phrases in its jargon. I have always gotten a kick out of "rain dance," meaning a seemingly pointless manuever that has fixative properties to some problem, such as turning off the lamp and unplugging the telephone to make the hard drive become unfrozen.

My mother became a computer progammer when I was about nine years old. I remember back then when a computer crashed or locked up they used the term "bomb," as in "the program just bombed." I remember being delighted with the figurative language, since bomb suggested a catastrophic failure.

Anybody else know any good programming gems?