Real Programmer
The term Real Programmer is used in computer programmers' folklore to describe the archetypical "hardcore" programmer. A Real Programmer eschews modern or graphical tools such as integrated development environments or languages other than assembly language or machine code in favour of more direct and efficient solutions – closer to the hardware.
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 Assembler programmers in the same way.
The archetypal Real Programmer is Mel Kaye of the Royal McBee Computer Corporation who is immortalised in "The Story of Mel"[1], one of the most famous pieces of hacker folklore. As the story infamously puts it, "He wrote in machine code – in 'raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly."'
Modernisation 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 actually the real programmer of the eighties "does all in FORTRAN" instead of Pascal, one of the nineties "does all in C rather than C++ or Java, or" does everything in Perl "rather than Python or Ruby.
See also
- Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, a 1983 parody of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche exploring the psychology of, and prospects for, the Real Programmer.