Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

This is a great sarcasm piece that seems timeless.<p>&quot;Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused.&quot;<p>&quot;Real Programmers don&#x27;t need comments -- the code is obvious.&quot;<p>&quot;If you can&#x27;t do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can&#x27;t do it in assembly language, it isn&#x27;t worth doing.&quot;<p>&quot;At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying ``Poor George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.&#x27;&#x27;

&gt; <i>Compilers with array bounds checking (...) stifle creativity, (...) and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts.</i><p>Absolute classic. The words to live by.

This is the post referenced in the opening of The Story of Mel; which may also be of interest. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catb.org&#x2F;jargon&#x2F;html&#x2F;story-of-mel.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catb.org&#x2F;jargon&#x2F;html&#x2F;story-of-mel.html</a>

One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, &quot;Beyond Compare&quot; is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

One irony is that modern Fortran is quite a nice language to work with. As long as you can just call, and don&#x27;t actually have to work on, all the &#x27;77 numerical libraries that the Real Programmers put together.

Although it&#x27;s meant to be sarcastic, I believe it nicely exposes typical things developers used to argue about back then, not that different from modern arguments about JS vs compiled-to-js, elixir vs erlang, GC vs manual memory management, etc.<p>Anybody knows some more serious piece from those times that would show the actual arguments of, say, PASCAL opponents?

Already amused by the comments based only on the title but not on the content:<p>&quot;Real Commenters don&#x27;t read the contents&quot;.

Was this written as satire back in 1982? Because it is great when read as satire.<p>As a real thing written by a real person, not so much.

Related: Real Men Don&#x27;t Play GURPS: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zipworld.com.au&#x2F;~hong&#x2F;dnd&#x2F;realmen.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zipworld.com.au&#x2F;~hong&#x2F;dnd&#x2F;realmen.htm</a> (slight trigger warning: the &quot;Real Men use swords to...&quot; list ends on a line which can be read as quite rapey, though I don&#x27;t think it was intended that way.)<p>(Note: it is a Windows-1292 document, correctly identified that way by a &lt;meta&gt; tag, which is incorrectly given a UTF-8 charset by a Content Type header. Therefore if the weird symbols are too distracting, you can save it to the hard drive and load it into a browser from there, and the symbols will resolve properly.)<p>It is worth reading for the line, &quot;If you can&#x27;t do it with a sword, do it with a fireball. If you can&#x27;t do it with a fireball, it isn&#x27;t worth doing.&quot;

I immediately thought of Bret Victor&#x27;s wonderful talk on, &#x27;The Future of Programming&#x27;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4</a>

I am outraged by all this quiche-shaming.

I&#x27;m surprised how well the letter &#x27;o&#x27; looks as a bullet point.

Real programmers should definitely try to use TECO. It can be described as a screen editor, but with no screen. Instead you need a good imagination.

&gt;thcught<p>you almost got me c, you almost, got me.

I did 4 years in high school.

Today this is true for a more obvious reason; Pascal is legacy.

&quot;Eating quiche&quot; used to be slang for a sexual act. It&#x27;s when the joke is most funny that we need to recognize mechanisms of exclusion.