"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" (a parody of the bestselling 1982 tongue-in-cheek book on stereotypes about masculinity Real Men Don't Eat Quiche) is an essay[1] about computer programming written by Ed Post of Tektronix, Inc., and published in July 1983 as a letter to the editor in Datamation.[2]
Widely circulated on Usenet in its day, and well known in the computer software industry[3] the article compares and contrasts real programmers, who use punch cards and write programs in FORTRAN or assembly language, with modern-day "quiche eaters" who use programming languages such as Pascal which support structured programming and impose restrictions meant to prevent or minimize common bugs due to inadvertent programming logic errors. Also mentioned are feats such as the inventor of the Cray-1 supercomputer toggling in[4] the first operating system for the CDC 7600 through the front panel without notes when it was first powered on.
The next year Ed Nather’s "The realest programmer of all"[5] USENET posting extended the theme, as have many subsequent articles,[6][7][8] cartoons[9] and in-jokes—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 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—closer to the hardware.[3] 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,[10] one of the 1990s might have done it "all in C", rather than C++ or Java, or "all in Perl" rather than Python or Ruby.
The term is often used to describe a more bare-metal way of doing something—for example: "Real Programmers don't use IDEs, they write programs using cat > a.out" (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 programmer might refer to an older C programmer as being a Real Programmer. In turn, these C programmers refer to older Assembly programmers in the same way.
See also
References
- ^ Post, Ed (July 1983). "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal". Datamation. Archived from the original on 2012-02-02.
- ^ Volume 29 number 7
- ^ a b Eric S. Raymond, editor (July 27, 1993). "Real Programmer". The New Hacker's Dictionary. Retrieved 2008-03-28.
{{cite web}}:|author=has generic name (help) - ^ Toggling in refers to setting an array of toggle switches or rocker switches which supplement program memory
- ^ Matt Crawford The realest programmer of all Newsgroup: net.jokes November 20, 1984.
- ^ Ian Gorton (November 1995). "Real Programmers Do Use Delphi". IEEE Software. 12 (6). IEEE Computer Society: 8–12. doi:10.1109/52.469755. Retrieved 2008-03-28.
- ^ Erik Brunvand (October 15, 1996). "The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age" (PostScript). p. 4. Retrieved 2008-03-28.
- ^ "More About Real Programmers". Archived from the original on 2008-04-19. Retrieved 2008-03-28.
- ^ REAL programmers xkcd.com
- ^ "... Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL ..."
External links
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