"Say you're writing a program and you discover you've done something wrong, like every time you try to use the program, a button pops up. Most programmers go in, analyze their program, find out what causes the button to pop up and cure it so it doesn't do that. [John] Draper [aka Captain Crunch] would go in and code around the button so when the bug occurs, the program knows it's made an error and fixes it, rather than avoiding the error in the first place. The joke is, if Draper were writing math routines for addition and he came up with the answer 2 + 2 = 5, he would put a clause in the program, if 2 + 2 = 5, then the answer is 4." — Chris Espinosa as quoted in Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), ch. 13 This type of solution is commonly called a "kludge." The kludge doesn't address the actual problem. The kludge addresses a symptom of the problem and hopes nobody will notice the difference. Another example: When Deirdre first bought her house in the Read More...