Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal: Difference between revisions

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}}</ref> about [[computer programming]] written by Ed Post of [[Tektronix, Inc.]], and published in July 1983 as a [[letter to the editor]] in ''[[Datamation]]''.<ref>Volume 29 number 7</ref>

Widely circulated on [[Usenet]] in its day, and well known in the computer software industry<ref name=Raymond>{{cite web

| url = http://www.th-soft.com/zzJargon/R.htm#Real_Programmer

| title = Real Programmer

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}}</ref> cartoons<ref>[http://xkcd.com/378/ REAL programmers] xkcd.com</ref> and in-jokes&mdash;with the alleged defining features of a "Real Programmer" differing with time and place, in the way of the "[[no true Scotsman]]".

==The Real Programmer in computer folklore==

The term ''Real Programmer'' in [[computer jargon|computer folklore]] has come to describe the archetypical "hardcore" programmer who eschews the modern languages and tools of the day in favour of more direct and efficient solutions—[[low-level programming language|closer to the hardware]].<ref name=Raymond/> 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 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 famously puts it, "He wrote in machine code—in 'raw, unadorned, inscrutable [[hexadecimal]] numbers. Directly."'

===Modernization of the real programmer===

Over the years, the figure of the "Real Programmer" was taken up and adapted as new and more powerful programming languages were created. If the real programmer of the 1980s did it "all in [[FORTRAN]]" instead of [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]],<ref>[http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html ''"...&nbsp;Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL&nbsp;..."'']</ref> one of the 1990s might have done it "all in [[C (programming language)|C]]", rather than [[C++]] or [[Java (programming language)|Java]], or "all in [[Perl]]" rather than [[Python (programming language)|Python]] or [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]].

The term is often used to describe a more [[bare-metal]] way of doing something—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.

==See also==

{{Wikipedia books|Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal}}

*[[The Story of Mel]]

*[[Pascal (programming language)#Criticism|Pascal criticism]]