TANSTAAFL
/tan'stah-fl/ (From Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress")
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
Often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly
heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software, or
at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell
me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to
work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to
the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in
hackerdom.
[Jargon File]
(1995-02-28)
Nearby terms:
Tanenbaum, Andrew « Tangible User Interface « tanked
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