Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal - Letter to the editor, Datamation July 1983 | Hacker News Reader

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal - Letter to the editor, Datamation July 1983

pbm.com

65 pointsokal41 comments

My favorite adaptation of this was called Real Men Don't Play GURPS. An excerpt:

~~~

The easiest way to tell a Real Man from the rest of the roleplaying crowd is by the game he plays. Real Men play Dungeons and Dragons. Quiche Eaters play GURPS and Storyteller. Mark Rein·Hagen, the designer of Storyteller, was once asked, "How do you pronounce the dot in your name?" He replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolises how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." One can tell immediately from this comment that Mark Rein·Hagen is a Quiche Eater. Real Men don't need the abstract concepts introduced by Quiche-Eating games — like characterisation, immersiveness or realism — to get their jobs done. They are perfectly happy with a sword, a spellbook, and a beer.

    Real Men use swords to kill monsters.
    Real Men use swords to tame the wilderness.
    Real Men use swords to negotiate peace treaties.
    Real Men use swords to romance the opposite sex.

If you can't do it with a sword, do it with a fireball. If you can't do it with a fireball, it isn't worth doing.

~~~

This last line is perhaps one of the greatest ever uttered. sniff

full text: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm

Regarding the quiche reference, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was a humor book and a meme back before there were memes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Dont_Eat_Quiche

(For those too young to remember... It's scary that if Marty from Back To The Future were to go back in time today, he would go back 30 years to 1982, instead of 1955 - http://i.imgur.com/VkHdj.jpg )

I'm reminded of an old P.J. Plauger "Books for Our Times" column, presumably for an April issue, with such titles as "Strictured Programming" and "Algorithms - Data Structures = Assembly Language".

Not to mention that it contained one of his own books.

Old school trolling is awesome.

"Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.)"

It's interesting when old lore like this gets posted. Always good to pick up a few historical shibboleths now and then.

Rails-bros and node-ninjas: got quiche? :)

Quiche eater - my new favorite word around the office!

Heh, someone should create some cool t-shirts.

"Got quiche, bro?"

"Quiche on Rails"

"Brogrammer. Will code for quiche."

Additionally, startups in the know should put "unlimited quiche" in their hiring posts. Free beer is soooo 2011.

the quiche is a lie...

I now know what it feels like to get trolled by a time traveler.

I have written one FORTRAN program in my entire life, back in 1991 when my first job included supporting a PRIME minicomputer. When we got a Solaris server later that year the terminal I used was only line oriented so I couldn't use vi and learned ed instead. I only started learning vi properly a few years ago. Old habits die really hard.

One of the scientific staff ran environmental simulations written in FORTRAN that took a week to run. When he ported it to SunOS it speeded up massively, so he just dialed up the detail level of the simulation so it still took a week. As of a few years ago they still used that simulation, and may still do so. I don't know how long it takes to run now though.

I, being one of the precise brats with trash-80s mentioned, bumped into it in 84-86 era. Fortran and pascal were, to me, options to basic and all three were somewhat ok, perfectly understandable and no use whatsoever since they were much to slow to do anything remotely cool on our tiny boxes. In high school four years down the line, I bumped into it again, trying to rewrite old fortran code in C and bumping into stuff written in pascal off and on, sometimes being pressured to write in Pascal. Again, we (true to our bratty nature) had no concept of what all the old timers were bickering about - unless you used C or assembler to get close to the metal, who cares? Write in Modula2, Perl, Basic, Lisp, ML, Smurf.. whatever. Once you're not using what the machine uses, pick your poison - it's of little concern to us, though sure, we'll write in it and read it it you'd like. Took another decade before I saw that there was some actual merit to debating what language to use since it influences the style quite a lot, but I still think it's perhaps given a little more credit than it is due.

I have an Atari Portfolio with its own onboard C compiler, Turbo C 2.0, still fully functional and working, all my old little proggies still there, gonna give it to my boys one of these days, hopefully it'll survive a while longer..

I think one of the commenters below lost the tone of the article. It's tongue in cheek. Back in the day (before my day), things were damn hard with barely adequate tools. Some of the accomplishments with these tools were truly amazing, but it takes a serious masochist to want to use such tools for all future jobs. Be grateful that you can build on the work of others.

For a more balanced comment about higher level tools, almost contemporary, see Fred Brooks comments in Mythical Man Month about using higher level languages (e.g. - APL, back in his day): one must look at what it does, and not just the cost of using it, before dismissing it out of hand.

Bah! Real programmers ship code!

You win. That's exactly what I try to make everyone understand. May I slightly improve your comment though?

"Bah! Real programmers ship good, properly reusable code"

Almost,

  In theory: "Bah! Real programmers ship good, properly reusable code"
  In practice: "Bah! Real programmers ship code, eventually."

Treating the matter seriously, Real Programmers do ship code, and they ship great code on a deadline. As noted in TFA, Real Programmers sent men to the moon and satellites to the edge of the solar system. The Voyager missions had launch windows that open every 175 years, slipping the ship date was not an option.

Quiche Eaters would still be arguing about when to delimit braces with {} and when with do/end, and which of the 3,141 testing framework gems released this weekend has the cutest name.

Perhaps after 175 additional years, they would come to an agreement on delimiters... but perhaps not.

http://xkcd.com/378/

Brilliant! I remember my Computer Architecture course's Professor telling us about this article :)

Fortran ignoramus here... is this true?: "...Fortran doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement..." How the heck did anyone loop until a condition was met?

Structured if implies block structure; Fortran had a single-statement if (with ambiguous lexing to boot). That single statement could be a goto.

so... you'd have to write a series of ifs and single-statement gotos every time?

Yep. I ran into Fortrash IV in college after doing '77 earlier. No "else" statement in IV.

IF NOT <<condition>> GOTO <<start of else>>

<<do iffy stuff>>

GOTO <<end-if>>

<<label for else>>

<<do elsey stuff>>

<<label for end-if>>

Barbarism at its finest :-)

Which is the main reason why Kernighan created Ratfor... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfor)

Yes. Welcome to the "good old days" of programming :)

My programmable calculator worked just like that, where the only flow control was in the form of goto. Seeing C for the first time was such a revelation. I remember being so excited to see all these things like for, while, etc. and it was immediately obvious just how much better they were.

Don't miss the unforgettable followup: The Story of Mel, a real programmer.

http://foldoc.org/The+Story+of+Mel

More seriously, http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

None of his issues (except the purely cosmetic complaints) apply to Turbo Pascal, which has been the de-facto standard dialect of Pascal for nearly 3 decades.

Agreed.

I think this was written before Turbo Pascal, which is really quite different from all other Pascals.

Yeah, I always found it quite educational to read about the state of the art in the old days. Helps to put things in perspective.

Heh - as some one who did write FORTRAN IV and 77 I all ways loved this article - oh and I did write billing systems in FORTRAN at BT

Fortran is still in use for technical programming when you realy realy need to get the most performance out of simulations.

It just reminds me of the time I got points off for writing a self-modifying macro in a TeX class.

Funny I was just mentioning Pascal to someone last night and how I disliked the language with a passion.

Quiche Eaters use Method VIII to build characters for the class they want.

Real Men roll d20 and take what they get. If the DM will allow negative ability scores, d30-5.

Is this a sarcasm article at that time?(which is brilliant!) Or just a serious article with a lot funny (lovely) idea back in 1980s?

"Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTOs." He lost me there, I can not embody this philosophy.

How's your quiche?

Priceless. Thank you :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com