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1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is
incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative,
rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in
context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to
worry about." See also hirsute.
A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point
Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a 2-sphere into
itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate
hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with the informal
version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth."
The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in
slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it
was equivalent to modern `hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very
likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun
`long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying
sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair
was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture,
leaving hackish `hairy' as a sort of stunted mutant relic.
