Kludge

The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989), cites Jackson W. Granholm's 1962 "How to Design a Kludge" article in the American computer magazine Datamation.[1]

kludge /kluːdʒ/ Also kluge. [J. W. Granholm's jocular invention: see first quot.; cf. also bodge v., fudge v.][2]
'An ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole' (Granholm); esp. in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or 'bodged' together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or 'bug'. ...

The OED entry also includes the verb kludge ("to improvise with a kludge or kludges") and kludgemanship ("skill in designing or applying kludges").

Granholm humorously imagined a fictitious source for the term:

Phineas Burling is the Chief calligrapher with the Fink and Wiggles Publishing Company, Inc. . . . According to Burling, the word "kludge" first appeared in the English language in the early fifteen-hundreds. . . . The word "kludge" is, according to Burling, derived from the same root as the German "klug" (Dutch kloog, Swedish Klag, Danish Klog, Gothic Klaugen, Lettish Kladnis and Sanskrit Veklaunn), originally meaning "smart" or "witty". In the typical machinations of language in evolutionary growth, the word "Kludge" eventually came to mean "not so smart" or "pretty ridiculous". . . . Today "kludge" forms one of the most beloved words in design terminology, and it stands ready for handy application to the work of anyone who gins up 110-volt circuitry to plug into the 220 VAC source. The building of a Kludge, however, is not work for amateurs.[3]

Although OED accepts Granholm's coinage of the term, there are examples of its use before the 1960s.

American Yiddish speakers use klug (קלוג) to mean "too smart by half", the reflected meaning of German klug ("clever"). This may explain the idea of clever but clumsy and temporary, as well as the pronunciation variation from German.[4]

Cf. German Kloß ("clod", diminutive Klößchen), Low Saxon klut, klute, Dutch kluit,[5] perhaps related to Low German diminutive klütje ("dumpling, clod"), Danish Jutland dialect klyt ("piece of bad workmanship, kludge"),[6] and Standard Danish kludder ("mess, disorder").

Arguments against the derivation from German klug:

• There is no equivalent usage in German
• Both pronunciations contain the soft "g" (dʒ) not present in German
• The word emerges in English only in the 20th century
• The alleged Swedish translation, klag, is incorrect and would properly be spelled klok.

Another hypothesis dates to 1907, "when John Brandtjen convinced two young machinists from Oslo, Norway named Abel and Eneval Kluge to service and install presses for his fledgling printing equipment firm". In 1919, the brothers invented an automatic feeder for printing presses which was a success, though "temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repair — but oh, so clever!" The Kluge brothers continued to innovate, and the company remained active as of 2020. Given that the feeder bore the Kluge name, it seems reasonable that it became a byword for over-complex mechanical contraptions.

Other suggested folk etymologies or backronyms for kludge or kluge are: klumsy, lame, ugly, dumb, but good enough; or klutzy lashup, under-going engineering.[7]

In aerospace, a kludge was a temporary design using separate commonly available components that were not flightworthy in order to proof the design and enable concurrent software development while the integrated components were developed and manufactured. The term was in common enough use to appear in a fictional movie about the US space program.[13]

Perhaps the ultimate kludge was the first US space station, Skylab. Its two major components, the Saturn Workshop and the Apollo Telescope Mount, began development as separate projects (the SWS was kludged from the S-IVB stage of the Saturn 1B and Saturn V launch vehicles, the ATM was kludged from an early design for the descent stage of the Apollo Lunar Module). Later the SWS and ATM were folded into the Apollo Applications Program, but the components were to have been launched separately, then docked in orbit. In the final design, the SWS and ATM were launched together, but for the single-launch concept to work, the ATM had to pivot 90 degrees on a truss structure from its launch position to its on-orbit orientation, clearing the way for the crew to dock its Apollo Command/Service Module at the axial docking port of the Multiple Docking Adapter.

The Airlock Module's manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, even recycled the hatch design from its Gemini spacecraft and kludged what was originally designed for the conical Gemini Command Module onto the cylindrical Skylab Airlock Module. The Skylab project, managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Marshall Space Flight Center, was seen by the Manned Spacecraft Center (later Johnson Space Center) as an invasion of its historical role as the NASA center for manned spaceflight. Thus, MSC personnel missed no opportunity to disparage the Skylab project, calling it "the kludge".

In modern computing terminology, a "kludge" (or often a "hack") is a solution to a problem, the performance of a task, or a system fix which is inefficient, inelegant ("hacky"), or even incomprehensible, but which somehow works. It is similar to a workaround, but quick and ugly. To "kludge around something" is to avoid a bug or difficulty by building a kludge, perhaps exploiting properties of the bug itself. A kludge is often used to modify a working system while avoiding fundamental changes, or to ensure backwards compatibility. Hack can also be used with a positive connotation, for a quick solution to a frustrating problem.[14][15]

A kludge is often used to fix an unanticipated problem in an earlier kludge; this is essentially a kind of cruft.

A solution might be a kludge if it fails in corner cases. An intimate knowledge of the problem domain and execution environment is typically required to build a corner-case kludge. More commonly, a kludge is a heuristic which was expected to work almost always, but ends up failing often.

A 1960s Soviet anecdote tells of a computer part which needed a slightly delayed signal to work. Rather than setting up a timing system, the kludge was to connect long coils of internal wires to slow the electrical signal.

Another type of kludge is the evasion of an unknown problem or bug in a computer program. Rather than continue to struggle to diagnose and fix the bug, the programmer may write additional code to compensate. For example, if a variable keeps ending up doubled, a kludge may be to add later code that divides by two rather than to search for the original incorrect computation.

In computer networking, use of NAT (Network Address Translation) (RFC 1918) or PAT (Port Address Translation) to cope with the shortage of IPv4 addresses is an example of a kludge.

In FidoNet terminology, kludge refers to a piece of control data embedded inside a message.

The kludge or kluge metaphor has been adapted in fields such as evolutionary neuroscience, particularly in reference to the human brain.

The neuroscientist David Linden discusses how intelligent design proponents have misconstrued brain anatomy.

The transcendent aspects of our human experience, the things that touch our emotional and cognitive core, were not given to us by a Great Engineer. These are not the latest design features of an impeccably crafted brain. Rather, at every turn, brain design has been a kludge, a workaround, a jumble, a pastiche. The things we hold highest in our human experience (love, memory, dreams, and a predisposition for religious thought) result from a particular agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolution history. It's not that we have fundamentally human thoughts and feelings despite the kludgy design of the brain as molded by the twists and turns of evolutionary history. Rather, we have them precisely because of that history.[16]

The research psychologist Gary Marcus's book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind compares evolutionary kluges with engineering ones like manifold vacuum-powered windshield wipers – when you accelerated or drove uphill, "Your wipers slowed to a crawl, or even stopped working altogether."

For instance, the vertebrate eye's retina that is installed backward, facing the back of the head rather than the front. As a result, all kinds of stuff gets in its way, including a bunch of wiring that passes through the eye and leaves us with a pair of blind spots, one in each eye.[17]