Real Programmer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:19, 2 July 2009

Revision as of 11:52, 17 July 2009

Line 3:

The term is often used to describe a more bare metal way of doing something - for example: "Real Programmers don't use IDEs, they write programs using <code>cat > [[a.out]]</code>" (that is, they write machine-readable binary files from beginning to end without making any mistakes). Each generation tends to slightly redefine a Real Programmer, as coding techniques change. For instance, a young [[Java (programming language)|Java]] programmer might refer to an older [[C (programming language)|C]] programmer as being a Real Programmer. In turn, these C programmers refer to older [[FORTRAN]] programmers in the same way.

The archetypal Real Programmer is [[Mel Kaye]] of the [[Royal McBee]] Computer Corporation who is immortalised in the "The Story of Mel", one of the most famous pieces of hacker folklore. As the story infamously puts it, "He wrote in machine code - in 'raw, unadorned, inscrutable [[hexadecimal]] numbers. Directly."'<ref>[http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html The story of Mel]</ref>

==See also==