trivial

	This is the JargonFile ^(V4.00) entry for trivial - Next: troff, Prev: trit
:trivial: /adj./ 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speakers time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish trivial usually evaluates to Ive seen it before). Hackers notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See nontrivial, uninteresting. The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), defined trivial theorem as "one that has already been proved".
* (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996* - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain)*