William Tenn suggests Heinlein in creating the word might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept of griggo, earlier introduced in Tenn's story "Venus and the Seven Sexes" (published in 1949).
In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible". ==Adoption and modern usage== ===In computer programmer culture=== 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.
Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality. According to the book, drinking water is a central focus on Mars, where it is scarce.
It's all hardware! It's a shame programmers don't grok that better." The Jargon File, which describes itself as a "Hacker's Dictionary" and has been published under that name three times, puts grok in a programming context: The entry existed in the very earliest forms of the Jargon File, dating from the early 1980s.
In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible". ==Adoption and modern usage== ===In computer programmer culture=== 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.
points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of Stranger, the word grok "was used first without any explicit definition on page 22" and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original).
A typical tech usage from the Linux Bible, 2005 characterizes the Unix software development philosophy as "one that can make your life a lot simpler once you grok the idea". The book Perl Best Practices defines grok as understanding a portion of computer code in a profound way.
All text is taken from Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License .
Page generated on 2021-08-05