<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 bare
metal 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 Programmers
Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet
and Internet in on-line form.
[Jargon File]
(1997-08-29)
Nearby terms:
real mode « real number « real operating system « Real Programmer » Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal » Real Soon Now » real-time
