"Grok" was a term used in my undergrad CS courses in the early 2010s. It's been a pretty common word in computing for a while now, though the current generation of young programmers and computer scientists seem not to know it as readily, so it may be falling out of fashion in those spaces.
> Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
> Its name derives from "grok", roughly meaning "to understand completely", which had previously entered geek slang.
Grok was specifically coined by Heinlein in _Stranger in a Strange Land_. It's been used in nerd circles for decades before your undergrad times but was never broadly known.
I'm aware of the provenance; I was specifically addressing the parent comment's assertion that it is not "a common word". It's a well-known word in the realm of computing, though perhaps less these days as the upcoming generation seems less inclined to learn archaic pop culture.
"Grok" was a term used in my undergrad CS courses in the early 2010s. It's been a pretty common word in computing for a while now, though the current generation of young programmers and computer scientists seem not to know it as readily, so it may be falling out of fashion in those spaces.