Real Programmer

[indirectly, from the book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal Real Programmer likes to program on the {bare metal} and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been tuned into a state of {tense}ness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it was hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to understand." Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers -- because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a {Good Thing} that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term itself was popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983 Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.

Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search engine should turn up a copy.

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