wetware
= W =
whack-a-mole
whack v.
According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of
NeWS, GOSMACS and Java), to "...modify a program with no
idea whatsoever how it works." (See whacker.) It is actually
possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if the change is
small and well-defined and you are very good at glarking
things from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively easy
to change all stderr writes to stdout writes in a
piece of C filter code which remains otherwise mysterious.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.