(From the 1930 Sellar and Yeatman parody "1066 And All That") Often capitalised; always pronounced as if capitalised.

1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice: "The Trailblazer's 19.2 Kbaud PEP mode with on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites relaying netnews".

2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later: "Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing".

3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in "Yacc is a Good Thing", specifically connotes that the thing has drastically reduced a programmer's work load.

Opposite: Bad Thing, compare big win.

[Jargon File]