good thing
Slang Dictionary
Good Thing
n.,adj. [very common; often capitalized; always pronounced as if capitalized.]1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice: "A language that manages dynamic memory automatically for you is a Good Thing."
2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later: "Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing."
3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in "YACC is a Good Thing", specifically connotes that the thing has drastically reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose Bad Thing.
Jargon
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Computing Dictionary
Good Thing definition
convention(From the 1930 Sellar and Yeatman parody "1066 And All That") Often capitalised; always pronounced as if capitalised.
1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice: "The Trailblazer's 19.2 Kbaud PEP mode with on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites relaying netnews".
2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later: "Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing".
3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in "Yacc is a Good Thing", specifically connotes that the thing has drastically reduced a programmer's work load.
Opposite: Bad Thing, compare big win.
[Jargon File]
(1995-05-07)
00:10
Good Thing
is always a great word to know.
So is interrobang. Does it mean:
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
| an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle. |
American Heritage
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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