[acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] There Ain't No Such Thing As
A Free Lunch
, often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect
of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or
at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the
signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet
newsgroups. What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database
back end to get my address book program to work!
Well,
TANSTAAFL you know.
This phrase owes some of its popularity to the
high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in
hackerdom (see Appendix B for
discussion).
Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL (There is No Such
Thing...
) is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952
in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen
from it by mutation.