Why is it mainly developers who grok something?

Question

According to Wikipedia, "To grok (pronounced /ˈgrɒk/) is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity".

But later "Uses of the word in the decades after the 1960s are more concentrated in computer culture, such as a 1984 appearance in InfoWorld: "There isn't any software! Only different internal states of hardware. It's all hardware! It's a shame programmers don't grok that better."

The usage is all over StackOverflow e.g.

• I don’t grok the WPF command pattern
• if 100 full time developers really grok distributed version control
• trying to grok the purpose of .NET's SecureString

A Google search for "grok" yields 1,250,000 hits.

This search "grok -computer -program -web -game -script -developer -software -bug" brings it down to 477,000 hits so approximately 2/3 of the Google hits are computer related. (OK - it's not scientific but close enough.)

Is there some kind of history or reason that explains this?

Answer 1

It's a dying term, and I never really liked it anyways. I prefer "comprehend" and "understand" because they're actually real words.

Answer 2

Probably a higher proportion of sci-fi geeks in programming than most other lines of work, is a fictional martian term, explained here: http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/grok.html

Answer 3

The word was coined in the 1960's novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A Heinlein, and I'm a Heinlein fan, so I tend to like this word.

As to your question, perhaps it's historical, in that computer scientists/hackers are likely to read and enjoy science fiction? Although the word in the novel was used in the sense of sharing consciousness, or completely understanding another being.

Another word/phrase that Heinlein coined which is more in popular culture is TANSTAAFL, or There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Answer 4

Similarly, "potato" estimates 46 million hits, but "potato -computer -program -web -game -script -developer -software -bug" is down to about 15 million. What is it with the computer industry and potatoes? In other words, your data isn't meaningful.

But granting that developers are partial to "grok", that's normal. New terms make their way through society over time and tend to cluster in different "areas". As one example, the term "backward compatibility police" is well known among many Perl developers but not so well known elsewhere.

Answer 5

The case is simply because more programmer speak Martian than people in other professions