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 K
baud 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)