Hacker News Reader

Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

To be complete on old programmer's lore, don't miss "Real programmers don't use PASCAL": https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

And of course, "The rise of 'Worse is Better'": https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/wor...

View on HN

The Story of Mel was likely in direct response to "Real programmers don't use PASCAL", or potentially another very similar "Real Programmers" writing.

A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:

Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

- the first lines of The Story Of Mel

That line was included in more than one post. There are also multiple posts from that time period which said exactly the opposite. It was an ongoing joke, raised to somewhat of an art form.

https://www.multicians.org/thvv/realprogs.html

http://www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/RPDEQ.html

https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20080419225755/http://www.suslik...

Old magazines, BBSes, Usenet, and mailing lists are full of this sort of humor.

https://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/project.html

The original version of the post [1] cited the article "Real programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by name. For some reason it disappeared in the later versions.

[1] https://cboh.org/mel.txt

Thank you. I thought I remembered that from elsewhere, and was a little surprised to see the oblique reference to one of the many similar writings from the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com