3 ms·
> Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Ahem. No. Real Programmers use machine code. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html
by a1369209993 8y ago
> Real Programmers use FORTRAN.
Ahem. No. Real Programmers use machine code.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
- analognoise 8y agoReal programmers only use punch cards for Jacquard looms.
- taneq 8y agoI love that story. In fact the whole Jargon File is a great source of elder geek lore. Another good source is http://www.folklore.org/ http://www.folklore.org/ for tales of the original Mac development team.
- leeman2016 8y ago> Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly. Reading that brings back one of the best memories of my childhood.
- eesmith 8y agoThe first Real Programmers used decimal, and programmed on the plugboards and portable function tables of the ENIAC. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC . The next Real Programmers programmed in octal, and sometime made mistakes balancing their checkbook by doing octal instead of decimal mathematics. See https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.htm https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.htm . You'll notice that Hopper and the ENIAC programmers are women. Programming at this time was seen as a woman's job. Then it became seen as a career for men. The early women programmers were overlooked; the ENIAC programmers weren't named in the early photos, and believed to be models - 'Refrigerator Ladies'. See http://mentalfloss.com/article/53160/meet-refrigerator-ladies-who-programmed-eniac http://mentalfloss.com/article/53160/meet-refrigerator-ladie... . As computers became more powerful, hex became the de facto. Much of the 'heroic literature of the olden days' comes from this era, so we view history through a decidedly - to quote the link text - "macho" lens. While it's certainly an enjoyable story, if we repeat it without the context, we continue to obscure the work of the first Real Programmers, and we propagate the false implication that "Real Programming" is intertwined with concepts of masculinity.
- tomcam 8y agoThe story features a programmer who coded in hexadecimal. It sounds a little apocryphal, but I worked with such a man myself – Tim Paterson, the creator of QDOS, which became MS-DOS. At the time he was on the Visual Basic compiler team at Microsoft, and I would go into his office while he was looking at hex dumps, which he found faster than reading disassembly.
- Gibbon1 8y agoI haven't thought of this in years. Sr Engineer wanted me to build a 'chamber simulator'. IE simulates a pressure chamber with a bunch of valves and interlocks. Wanted me to implement it with analog circuits and jungle logic. I went fuck that and hand built a board with an 8051. Wrote the program in assembly on paper. Hand translated it to hex. And then used a hex editor to generate the hex file. Which I used to burn the epprom. Took two days to debug it.
- Gibbon1 8y agoA real programmer can write FORTRAN 77 in any language. Actual thing. Friend of mine is retired black female programmer who mentioned hot patching assembly on IBM mainframes back in the late 60's.
- ido 8y agoWhat is the relevance of her being black & female to the anecdote?
- elygre 8y agoReal programmers have a shortcut on C-x M-c M-butterfly.