Real Programmer: Difference between revisions

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The term '''Real Programmer''' is a specific example of the [[No True Scotsman]] fallacy used in [[computer programming|computer programmer]]s' [[folklore]] to describe the archetypical "hardcore" programmer. Awho ''Realeschews Programmer'' eschewsthe modern orlanguages graphicaland tools suchof asthe [[integrated development environment]]s or languages other than [[assembly language]] or [[machine code]]day in favour of more direct and efficient solutions – [[low-level programming language|closer to the hardware]]. The alleged defining features of a "Real Programmer" are extremely subjective, differing with time and place, in the fashion of the "[[no true Scotsman]]" fallacy.

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).{{Citation needed|date=June 2011}} 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.{{Citation needed|date=June 2011}} In turn, these C programmers refer to older [[Assembly_language#Assembler|Assembly]] programmers in the same way.{{Citation needed|date=June 2011}}