[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 bummed into a state of tenseness 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 1983 Datamation article "Real
Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on
Usenet and Internet in on-line form.
You can browse "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the
Datamation home page http://www.datamation.com.
