hairy

   1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."

   2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."

   3.  Of  people,  high-powered,  authoritative,  rare,  expert, and/or
   incomprehensible.  Hard  to explain except in context: "He knows this
   hairy  lawyer  who  says  there's  nothing  to worry about." See also
   {hirsute}.

   There  is  a  theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that
   any  continuous  tangent  field  on  a 2-sphere is null at least in a
   point.  Mathematically  literate  hackers  tend to associate the term
   `hairy'  with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a
   hairy  ball smooth." (Previous versions of this entry associating the
   above  informal  statement  with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were
   incorrect.)

   The  adjective  `long-haired'  is well-attested to have been in slang
   use  among  scientists  and  engineers during the early 1950s; it was
   equivalent  to  modern  hairy  senses  1  and  2, and was very likely
   ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun `long-hair' was at the
   time  used  to  describe  a  person  satisfying  sense 3. Both senses
   probably  passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature
   trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a sort of
   stunted mutant relic.

   In   British   mainstream   use,   "hairy"   means  "dangerous",  and
   consequently,  in  British  programming terms, "hairy" may be used to
   denote  complicated  and/or  incomprehensible  code, but only if that
   complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {DWIM}{elephantine}{gnarly}{gonzo}{hair}{hello world}{hirsute}{hook}{one-liner wars}{plumbing}{prettyprint}{studly}{TECO}{trampoline}{voodoo programming}]