I keep seeing "bootstrapping" mentioned in discussions of application development. It seems both widespread and important, but I've yet to come across even a poor explanation of what bootstrapping actually is; rather, it seems as though everyone is just supposed to know what it means. I don't, though. Near as I can figure, it has something to do with initialization tasks required of an application upon launch, but I could be completely wrong about that. Can anyone help me to understand this idea?
"Bootstrapping" comes from the term "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps." That much you can get from Wikipedia.
In computing, a bootstrap loader is the first piece of code that runs when a machine starts, and is responsible for loading the rest of the operating system. In modern computers it's stored in ROM, but I recall the bootstrap process on the PDP-11, where you would poke bits via the front-panel switches to load a particular disk segment into memory, and then run it. Needless to say, the bootstrap loader is normally pretty small.
"Bootstrapping" is also used as a term for building a system using itself -- or more correctly, a predecessor version. For example, ANTLR version 3 is written using a parser developed in ANTLR version 2.