due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has
become less common as the relative costs of programming time and
machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily
constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems, and
in the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level
control. See {Real Programmer}.

In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming
(especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often
considered a {Good Thing}, or at least a necessary evil
(because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and
poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}).
There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS
interface and writing the application to directly access device
registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the
serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who
can do this sort of thing well are held in high regard.

:barf: /barf/ /n.,v./ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']
1. /interj./ Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish
equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!)
See {bletch}. 2. /vi./ To say "Barf!" or emit some similar
expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he
barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he
literally vomited. 3. /vi./ To fail to work because of
unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps
not. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide
by 0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to
divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation
to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The