kung foo

Kung Foo: a twist of the martial arts name Kung Fu which pertains to skill either in hacking (not cracking) or munging code.

Used in a sentence: I've got way more kung foo than that dude.

I think this is a term that was in its most use around about the same time that "krad" was used.


You didn't see the X-Files episode?

Is indeed a variation on Kung-Fu for the hacking community. It has been said that:

Kung-Fu means skill through dicipline,
Kung-Foo means skill through badass programming powers.

This term is rather flexable and can refer to pretty much any computer skills that you might posess.

The X-Files episode mentioned above is "Unusual Suspects" (episode: 5X01 which first aired 11/16/97) and refers to a scene in which Frohike of the lone gunmen demands to have his ego appeased by being told that his kung foo is the best before he will assist in hacking a government database.

The widest usage of Kung Foo is programming. Other hackers (and programmers in general) use Kung Foo to describe coding arts. It's used in the more my code is bigger\faster\better then yours. Another way to look at Kung Foo is the Tao of Programming. If you don't know what the Tao is, you should read your fortunes file every now and then.