Real Programmer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:16, 27 August 2010

Revision as of 00:22, 3 December 2010

Line 1:

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]].

[[File:Real_programmers.png|thumb|A strip from webcomic [[XKCD]] satirizing the "real programmer" term as well as the [[editor wars]].]]

The term is often used to describe a more bare-metal way of doing something &ndash; for example: "Real Programmers don't use [[integrated development environment|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.