Real Programmer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 08:34, 30 January 2011

Revision as of 23:55, 4 April 2011

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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|Assembly]] 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",<ref>[http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html The story of Mel]</ref>, 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."'

==Modernization of the real programmer==

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==External links==

*[http://www.multicians.org/thvv/realprogs.html "Real Programmers Don't Write Specs": A list of 'Real programmers...' assertions]

[[Category:Computer jargon]]

[[Category:Computer folklore]]