[rl12345]

Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author.

The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.

[zorked]

Accurately translated in English as "hack".

[whatever_dude]

This. A "hack" is the same as a "gambiarra".

In all honesty, my impression is that some admirers of the Brazilian Portuguese language frequently believe there are words and concepts that are exclusive to that language while in reality there's, more often than not, a very good translation in English or other languages.

[leobueno]

The more appropriate translation would be "kludge".

[rl12345]

Where I come from, "Gambiarra" sometimes has a bad connotation -- in the sense that it was not well thought. So, maybe, a lazy hack?

[TheSpiceIsLife]

English hack is very much the same. Only in the computer / hobby usage sense does hack mean skilful or clever. The opposite being the engineered solution, opposite in the computer / hobby sense in that engineered often means over engineered and not fun.

From http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hack?s=t

hack, verb

1. to cut, notch, slice, chop, or sever (something) with or as with heavy, irregular blows (often followed by up or down): to hack meat; to hack down trees.

2. to break up the surface of (the ground).

3. to clear (a road, path, etc.) by cutting away vines, trees, brush, or the like: They hacked a trail through the jungle.

4. to damage or injure by crude, harsh, or insensitive treatment; mutilate; mangle: The editor hacked the story to bits.

5. to reduce or cut ruthlessly; trim: The Senate hacked the budget severely before returning it to the House.

6. Slang. to deal or cope with; handle: He can't hack all this commuting.

7. Computers:

a. to modify (a computer program or electronic device) or write (a program) in a skillful or clever way: Developers have hacked the app. I hacked my tablet to do some very cool things.

b. to circumvent security and break into (a network, computer, file, etc.), usually with malicious intent: Criminals hacked the bank's servers yesterday.

[zorked]

"Hack" also has that same bad connotation. E.g. type in a changelog that you added a "hack" to fix a bug.

[throwanem]

I'd tend to agree, sort of sidewise, with the article author that "hack", like "make" in the "maker culture" sense, is freighted with all kinds of connotations that I think somewhat blur its applicability here.

Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions.

To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste.

On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have.

[rmsaksida]

Many years ago, in my first programming job, I had to do an ugly hack to fix an issue in production that was preventing other people from doing their jobs. In the minutes before I made that decision, while I was contemplating the problem, my colleague (a senior) asked me with a very serious face: have you ever heard of the POG methodology?

"POG"? No... should I have?

He smiled and explained it to me - Programação Orientada a Gambiarra, or "Gambiarra Oriented Programming".

[pjmlp]

On the other side of Atlantic also means a cable for light extension. :)

[rl12345]

Probably the origin of the expression :)

[goshx]

Yep! I used a plastic tube (as a spacer, not as a tube) and a rubber band to fix my leaking toilet. It gives you that "I'm MacGyver" feeling.