[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 tuned
into a state of {tense}ness 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 letter to the editor
in the July 1983 Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.
Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search engine
should turn up a copy.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bare metal}{code grinder}{ed}{languages of choice}{YAFIYGI}]