Real Programmer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:40, 18 January 2010

Revision as of 17:41, 18 January 2010

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The term '''Real Programmer''' is used in [[computer programming|computer programmer]]s' [[folklore]] to describe the archetypical "hardcore" programmer. A ''Real Programmer'' eschews modern or graphical tools such as [[integrated development environment]]s or languages other than [[assembly language]] or [[machine code]] in favour of more direct and efficient solutions – [[low-level programming language|closer to the hardware]].

The term is often used to describe a more bare -metal way of doing something &ndash; 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 [[Assembly_language#Assembler|Assembler]] programmers in the same way.

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