Real Programmers...

<i>The academics in computer science have gotten into the "_____" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the example they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another-- clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000 line programs that WORKED (Really!). Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000 line program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the _____ in the world won't help you solve a problem like that-- it takes actual talent.</i><p>This paragraph still holds, and it does so for any quiche-eating,effete value of _____.

1983? It's obvious this guy is just a kid. The stuff he talks about is new stuff. OS/370, 029 keypunches, Fortran 66, Quiche, for god's sake? I started programming in college in Fortran II on a 7094 running UMES (University of Michigan Executive System). The 360 let alone the 370 was yet to appear. Quiche had yet to make it across the Atlantic. My roommate told tales of his summer job in high school, programming an IBM 650 for NASA. The 650 didn't even have core memory, just a drum.<p>It wasn't "Real Programmers". It was "Real Men" programmed in Assembly Language. "Boys" programmed in Fortran. We had our testosterone unadulterated. Except an old coot told me, "Real Men do it in binary."<p>None of this Pac-Man stuff. We played baseball using the index register lights on the 7094 console and Space War on the PDP-1. We didnt use terminals or even the newfangled terminals, just the trusty 026 keypunch.<p>I tell you, we were Real Men, even the girls.

Honestly, I sat down to read this with the preconceived notion that it would be part of an ancient language war, but instead discovered one of the most cleverly written pieces of satire I can remember.<p>I especially like how the things he derides as belonging to "quiche eaters" (notably Unix, Emacs, and Vi), are what we consider 'hardcore tools for real programmers' today.

I still think my favorite "hackers of old" story is The Story of Mel: <a href="http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html</a>

<i>If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only impresses the hell out of his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation.</i><p>Wow, some things never change ;-)

<i>If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.</i><p>Physics department guys in my university had this printed out and stapled to the wall. Pretty much all math modeling libraries they wrote were in Fortran with some bottlenecks redone in assembly. It was more than 20 years ago though :)

Seems to parallel how some of the Pascal/C/C++ era programmers feel about Python/Ruby/PHP web developers of today.

I liked this:<p>"Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked, "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'.""

A true classic, and wonderfully funny. Though I prefer tea.