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

{bum}med 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 appals. 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}". The term

itself was popularised by a 1983 Datamation article "{Real

Programmers Don't Use Pascal}" by Ed Post, still circulating

on {Usenet} and Internet in on-line form.

[{Jargon File}]

(1997-08-29)