Real Programmer: n. [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'.
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