Wednesday, 12 January 2000
.....
When programmers need to move existing software from one
platform to another (e.g. MacOS to Linux), they call it
"porting". "Portable software" is software that's easy to
move, usually you just set up some configuration flags and
recompile.
But we need a word for code that doesn't port so easily. Sure,
we can do it, but it'll take some work. Maybe half the code is
written using some standard like POSIX, but the rest uses some
proprietary language.
The solution comes from history. Back in the early days of
Personal Computing, Compaq came out with the first portable
computer. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't light. It wasn't so
much portable as it was luggable. Therefore, code that is not
easily portable should be called "luggable".
This is Software Porting Neologism <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/37>