Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive
by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like
dusty deck or gonkulator, but
connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an active
menace to health and sanity. Mostly we code new stuff in C, but
they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from
nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror....
Compare
WOMBAT.
This usage is almost certainly derived from the fiction of
H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft may never have used the exact phrase
crawling horror
in his writings, but one of the fearsome
Elder Gods that he wrote extensively about was Nyarlethotep, who had as an
epithet The Crawling Chaos
. Certainly the extreme, even
melodramatic horror of his characters at the weird monsters they encounter,
even to the point of going insane with fear, is what hackers are referring
to with this phrase when they use it for horribly bad code. Compare
cthulhic.