Real Programmer [indirectly, from the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] n. A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed
of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when
justified by experience. The archetypal `Real Programmer' likes
to program on the bare metal and is very good at same,
remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever
programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit
his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real
Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been bummed
into a state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real
Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it was
hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to
understand." Real Programmers can make machines do things that
were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really
happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its
fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real
Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on
their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers ---
because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand
their code in order to change it. Their successors generally
consider it a Good Thing that there aren't many Real
Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more
positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see "{The Storyof Mel, a Real Programmer}
" in {Appendix A}. The term itself
was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article "Real
Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on
USENET and Internet in on-line form.