golfed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of golf.

   She golfed professionally for nearly a decade before retiring.

   The executives golfed while their deals quietly fell apart.

   Note

   A regular past form, so one spelling serves both she golfed and she has golfed. The verb behind it does two jobs. On the course it takes no object (they golfed all weekend). In programming it takes one, meaning to squeeze something into as few characters as possible (he golfed the regex). That second, transitive use gives rise to the code-golf adjective, as in golfed code.

2. 2
   adjective

   Reduced to the shortest possible source code, following the practice of code golf, where brevity is the goal.

   The golfed version shaved the function down to a single line.

   Reviewers struggled to maintain the heavily golfed script.

   Note

   A programmer's borrowing from the links: as in golf, the lowest count wins, but here the strokes are characters. Golfed code is written for that score, not for the next person who has to read it. That is why it keeps company with obfuscated code. Chromatic, Damian Conway and Curtis Poe's Perl Hacks (2006) sets both aside in favor of honest profiling. Applied to working code, the word is rarely praise.

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