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January 4, 2007

Kludge

A kludge (usually pronounced klooj, with the oo and in food) is something thrown together thoughtlessly, and usually quickly, which works, more or less, but which is generally ugly, and may be either underperforming or missing functionality or both. Examples include quick scripts for copying files across the network as a sort of poor-man's backup system, or using system components for purposes for which they were not designed (such as using print queues as a network messaging service — and yes, I've actually seen this done). A kludge is not necessarily broken, but it is necessarily inelegant, often even ugly, and generally offensive to the sensibilities of all right-thinking IT people. In other words, the term is usually an insult.

Posted by jeff at January 4, 2007 6:05 PM

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