2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Real Programmer
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. [indirectly, from the book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche ] A particular
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sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward
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complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The
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archetypal Real Programmer likes to program on the bare metal and is very
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good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever
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programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code
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because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied
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with code that hasn't been tuned into a state of tense ness just short of
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rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: If it
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was hard to write , says the Real Programmer, it should be hard to
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understand. Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in
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their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A
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Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its
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crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang
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line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other
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programmers because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand
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their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a
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Good Thing that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a
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famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see The
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Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term itself was popularized by a letter to
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the editor in the July 1983 Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use
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Pascal by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.
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Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search engine should
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turn up a copy.
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