Real Programmer

English

Alternative forms

• real programmer

Noun

Real Programmer (plural Real Programmers)

1. (computing, slang) An archetypal highly skilled programmer, who eschews abstractions and convenient modern tools and methods of programming, instead preferring to use a manually-optimised low-level language or program directly in machine code for maximum performance.
   • 1995, Andrew Davison, Humour the Computer, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 50:

     Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because ...

   • 2002, Julian Templeman, Andy Olsen, Microsoft Visual C++.NET Step by Step, →ISBN, page 618:

     Julian Templeman first touched fingers to keypunch in 1972, punching Fortran code onto cards at college in London. Soon after, he moved on to Macro- 11 programming on PDP-11s. This qualifies him as a Real Programmer, and until recently, he had a PDP-11 in his garage to remind him of better times.

   • 2003, John Ray, William Ray, Mac OS X Maximum Security, Sams Publishing, →ISBN, page 56:

     Interdicted Real Programmer. Not someone you want to get in the way of, he's usually the best programmer on a project, and he's usually annoyed because management has stuck yet another stupid wall between him and getting his job done.

   • 2011, Kevin B. Bennett, John M. Flach, Display and Interface Design: Subtle Science, Exact Art, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 110:

     The Real Programmer wants a “you asked for it, you got it” text editor; one that is complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, and dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

Translations

archetype of low-level programmer

Further reading

• Eric S[teven] Raymond, editor (2003 December 29), “Real Programmer”, in The Jargon File, version 4.4.7.