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G pref.,suff. 1. [SI] See {quantifiers}. 2. The letter G has special significance in the hacker community, largely thanks to the GNU project and the GPL. Many {free software} projects have names that names that begin with G. The GNU project gave many of its projects names that were acronyms beginning with the word "GNU", such as "GNU C Compiler" (gcc) and "GNU Debugger" (gdb), and this launched a tradition. Just as many Java developers will begin their projects with J, many free software developers will begin theirs with G. It is often the case that a program with a G-prefixed name is licensed under the GNU GPL. For example, someone may write a free Enterprise Engineering Kludge package (EEK technology is all the rage in the technical journals) and name it "geek" to imply that it is a GPL'd EEK package.
gang bang n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers), and large numbers of loosely-coupled programmers operating in {bazaar} mode can do very useful work when they're not on a deadline, most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet unrealistic deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in {orthogonal}ity. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes to {epsilon}. See also {firefighting}, {Mongolian Hordes technique}, {Conway's Law}.
Gang of Four n. (also abbreviated GOF) [prob. a play on the 'Gang Of Four' who briefly ran Communist China after the death of Mao] Describes either the authors or the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software published in 1995 by Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-63361-2). The authors forming the Gang Of Four are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. They are also sometimes referred to as 'Gamma et. al.' The authors state at http://www.hillside.net/patterns/DPBook/GOF.html "Why are we ... called this? Who knows. Somehow the name just stuck." The term is also used to describe any of the design patterns that are used in the book, referring to the patterns within it as 'Gang Of Four Patterns.'
garbage collect vi. (also garbage collection, n.) See {GC}.
garply /gar´plee/, n. [Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (see {foo}); once popular among SAIL hackers.
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