Real Programmer

job, humour (From the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche") A

variety of hacker possessed of a flippant attitude toward

complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience.

The archetypal "Real Programmer" likes to program on the baremetal and is very good at it, remembers the binary op codes

for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that

high-level languages 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 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 ProgrammersDon't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet

and Internet in on-line form.

[Jargon File]

(1997-08-29)