In the good old days - the "Golden Era" of computers, it was
easy to separate the real men from the boys (sometimes called
"Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this
period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer
programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A
real computer programmer said things like:
DO 10 I=1 10
and
ABEND
They talked in capital letters, you understand. The rest of the
world said things like "computers are too complicated for me"
and, "I can't relate to computers - they're so impersonal". A
previous work [1] points out that Real Men don't "relate to"
anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.
But, as usual times change. We are faced today with a world in
which little old ladies can get computers in their microwave
ovens, 12-year old kids can blow real Men out of the water
playing Asteroids and Pac-Man, and anyone can buy and understand
their very own personal computer. The Real Programmer is in
danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school
students with TRS-80's.
There is a clear need to point out the differences between the
typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer.
If this difference is made clear, it will give these kids
something to aspire to - a role model, a Father Figure. It will
also help to explain to the employers of Real Programmers why it
would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their
staff with 12-year old Pac-Man players (at very considerable
salary savings).
LANGUAGES
The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by
the programming language he or she uses. The Real Programmers
use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use Pascal. Nicklaus Wirth, the
designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked "How
do you pronounce your name?" He replied, "You can call me by my
name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or you can call me by my value,
'Worth'." One can tell immediately from this comment that
Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing
mechanism that Real Programmers endorse is "call by
value-return", as implemented in the IBM/370 FORTRAN G and II
compilers. Real Programmers don't need all those abstract
concepts to get their jobs done - they are perfectly happy with
a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer.
Real Programmers do List Processing in FORTRAN.
Real Programmers do String Manipulation in FORTRAN.
Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in FORTRAN.
Real Programmers do Artificial Intelligence programs in FORTRAN.
If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in Assembly Language. If
you can't do it in Assembly Language, it isn't worth doing.
STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING
The academics in computer science have got into the "structured
programming" rut over the past several years. They claim that
programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some
special language constructs and techniques. They don't all
agree on exactly what constructs, of course, and the examples
they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit
on a single page of some obscure journal or another - clearly
not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of
school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I
could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five
different computer languages, and create 1000-line programs that
WORKED (really)!!! Then I got out into the real world. My
first task in the Real World was to read and understand a
200,000-line FORTRAN program, then speed it up by a factor of
two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all Structured
Coding in the world won't help you with a task like that - it
takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real
Programmers and Structured Programming:
Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTO'S.
Real Programmers can write five-page long DO loops without
getting confused.
Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF Statements - they make the
code more interesting.
Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they
can save 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop.
Real Programmers don't need comments - the code is obvious.
Since FORTRAN doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or
CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not
using them. Besides, all those structures can be simulated,
when necessary, by using assigned GOTO's.
Data Structures have also gotten a lot of press lately.
Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings
have become popular in certain circles. Nicklaus Wirth (the
aforementioned Quiche Eater) actually managed to write an entire
book [2] contending that you could write a program based on Data
Structures, instead of the other way around. As all Real
Programmers know, the only useful Data Structure is the ARRAY.
Strings, Lists, Structures, Sets - they are all just special
cases of Arrays and can be treated that way just as easily
without messing up your programming language with all sorts of
complications. The worst thing about fancy data types is that
you have to declare them, and Real Programming Languages, as we
all know, have implicit typing based in the first letter of the
(six character) variable name.
OPERATING SYSTEMS
What kind of operating system does the Real Programmer use?
CP/M? God forbid - CP/M, after all, is basically a toy
operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school
students can use and understand CP/M.
UNIX is a lot more complicated of course - the typical UNIX
hacker never can remember what the print command is called this
week. But when it gets right down to it, UNIX is a glorified
video game. People don't do serious work on UNIX systems - they
send jokes around the world on UUCP-net, and write adventure
games and research papers.
No your Real Programmer uses OS/370. A good programmer can find
and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got
in the JCL manual. The great programmer can write JCL without
referring to the JCL manual at all. The truly outstanding
programmer can find bugs buried in a six-Megabyte core dump
without using a hex calculator (I have actually seen this done).
OS/370 is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to
destroy days of work with a single misplaced space*1, so
alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way
to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim
that there is a Time Sharing System that runs OS/370, but after
careful study I have come to the conclusion that they were
mistaken.
PROGRAMMING TOOLS
What kinds of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a
Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the
front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers
had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your
typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by
memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever his program destroyed
the bootstrap. Back then memory was memory - it didn't go away
when the power was off. Today, memory either forgets things
when you don't want it to or remembers things long after they
are best forgotten. Legend has it that Seymour Cray (who
invented the Cray-1 supercomputer, and most of the Control
Data's computers) actually toggles the first operating system
for the CDC-7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was
first powered on. Seymour, needless to say, is a Real
Programmer.
One of my favourite Real Programmers was a systems programmer at
Texas Instruments. One day, he got a long distance call from a
user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some
important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the
telephone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions
at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading
register contents back over the telephone. The moral of the
story: while a Real Programmer usually includes a keypunch and
lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front
panel and a telephone in emergencies.
In some cases, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers
standing in line to use an 020 keypunch. In fact, the building
I work in doesn't contain a single keypunch. The Real
Programmer in this situation has to work with a "text editor"
program. Most systems supply several text editors to select
from, and the Real Programmer must be careful to pick one that
reflects his personal style. Many people believe that the best
text editors in the world were written at Xerox Palo Alto
research Centre for use on their Alto and Dorado computers [3].
Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would use a computer whose
operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly never
talk to the computer with a mouse.
Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been
incorporated into editors running more reasonable operating
system - EMACS and VI being two. The problem with these editors
is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get"
is just as bad a concept in Text Editing as it is in women. No,
the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text
editor - complicated, cryptic , powerful, unforgiving and
dangerous. TECO to be precise.
It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely
resembles transmission -line noise than readable text [4]. One
of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your
name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just
about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will
probably destroy your program, or worse, introduce subtle and
mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.
For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit
a program that is close to working. They find it much easier
instead to just patch the binary object code directly, using a
wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM
machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM
systems bear no relation to the original FORTRAN code. In many
cases, the original code is no longer available. When it comes
time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of
sending anyone less than a Real Programmer to do the job - no
Quiche Eating Structured Programmer would even know where to
start. This is called "Job Security".
Here are some programming tools that Real Programmers don't use:
FORTRAN preprocessors like MORTRAN and RATFCOR. These are the
Cuisinarts of programming - great for making Quiche. See the
comments above on Structured Programming.
Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps.
Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity,
destroy most of the interesting uses for the EQUIVALENCE
statement, and make it impossible to modify the operating system
code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is
inefficient.
Source code maintainable systems. A Real Programmer keeps the
code locked up in a card file, because it implies that the owner
cannot leave important programs unguarded [5].
THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK
Where does the Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are
worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be
sure that no Real Programmer would be caught dead writing
accounts-receivable programs in COBOL, or sorting mailing lists
for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of
earth-shattering importance (literally!).
Real Programmers work for Los Alomos National Laboratory,
writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray-1 supercomputers.
Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding
Russian transmissions.
It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real
Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and
back before the Russkies.
Real Programmers programmed the computers in the Space Shuttle.
Real Programmers are at work for Boeing, designing the operating
systems for cruise missiles.
Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the
entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by
heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN
programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs,
they are able to do incredible feats of navigations and
improvisation - hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn
after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor
platforms, radios and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer
managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred
bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched
for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a
gravity-assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This
trajectory passes 80r3 kilometres of the surface of Mars.
Nobody is going to trust a Pascal program (or a Pascal
programmer for that matter) for the navigation to those
tolerances.
As you can tell many of the worlds Real Programmers work for the
U.S. government - mainly the Defense Department. This is as it
should be. Recently however, a black cloud has formed on the
Real Programmers horizon. It seems that some highly placed
Quiche-Eaters at the Defense Department decided that all Defense
programs should be written in some grand unified language called
Ada (DoD). For a while, it seemed that Ada was destined to
become a language which went against the precepts of Real
Programming - a language with structure, a language with data
types, strong typing, and semi-colons. In short, a language
designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real
Programmer. Fortunately, the language which the DoD adopted has
enough interesting features to make it approachable - its
incredible complex, includes methods for messing with the
operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsger Dijkstra
doesn't like it [6]. Dijkstra, as I'm sure you know, was the
author of "The Go To Considered Harmful" - a landmark in
programming methodology, applauded by Pascal Programmers and
Quiche-Eaters alike. Besides, the determined Real Programmer
can write FORTRAN programs in any language.
Real Programmers might compromise their principles and work on
something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as
we know it, providing there's enough money in it. There are
several Real Programmers writing video games at Atari, for
example (but not playing them - a Real Programmer knows how to
beat the machine every time - no challenge in that). Everybody
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, mainly because nobody has found a use for computer
graphics yet. On the other hand, all Computer Graphics
programming is done in FORTRAN, so there are a fair number of
people doing Graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL
programs.
THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY
Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works -
with computers. The Real Programmer is constantly amazed that
his employer actually pays him for what he would be doing for
fun anyway (although he is careful not to express this opinion
out loud). Occasionally, a Real Programmer does step out of the
office for a breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips
on recognizing Real Programmers away from the computer room:
At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner
talking about operating system security and how to get around it.
At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the
plays against a simulation printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper.
At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts
in the sand.
At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying "Poor
George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the
coronary".
In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists
on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself,
because he could never trust keypunch operators to get it right
the first time.
THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITAT
What sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best
in? This is an important question for the managers of Real
Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep a
Real Programmer on the staff, its best to put him or her in an
environment where they can actually get the work done.
The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer
terminal. Surrounding this terminal are:
Listings of all the programs the Real Programmer has ever worked
on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface
in the office.
Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee.
Occasionally there will be cigarette buts floating in the
coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush.
Unless the Real Programmer is very good, there will be copies of
the OS JCL manual and Principles of Operation open at some
particularly interesting pages.
Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calender for the year
1969.
Strewn about the floor are several wrappers of the peanut butter
filled cheese bars - of the type that are made pre-stale at the
bakery so that they can't get any worse while waiting in the
vending machine.
Hiding in the top left hand draw of the desk is a stash of
double-stuff Orcos for special occasions.
Underneath the Orcos is a flow-charting template, left there by
the previous occupant of the office. Real Programmers write
programs, not the documentation - leave that to maintenance
people.
The Real Programmer is capable of working thirty, forty, even
fifty hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, the
Real Programmer prefers it that way. Bad response time doesn't
bother the Real Programmer - it provides the chance to catch a
little sleep between compiles. If there is not enough schedule
pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more
challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the
problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the
last week, in two or three fifty-hour marathons. This not only
impresses the hell out of the Real Programmers manager, who was
despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but also
creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In
general:
No Real Programmer works nine to five (unless its the ones at
night).
A Real Programmer might or might not know the name of their
spouse. The Real Programmer does, however, know the entire
EBCDIC (or ASCII) code table.
Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't
open at three o'clock in the morning. Real Programmers survive
on Twinkies and coffee.
THE FUTURE
What of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real
Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers
are not being brought up with the same outlook on life as their
elders. Many of them have never seen a computer with a front
panel. Hardly anyone graduating from school these days can do
hex arithmetic without a calculator. College graduates these
days are soft - protected from the realities of programming by
source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses, and
"user friendly" operating systems. Worst of all, some of these
alleged "Computer Scientists" manage to get degrees without ever
learning FORTRAN! Are we destined to become an industry of UNIX
hackers and Pascal programmers?
From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright
for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS/370 nor FORTRAN
show any signs of dying out, despite all the efforts of Pascal
programmers the world over. Even more subtle tricks, like
adding structure programming constructs to FORTRAN, have failed.
Oh sure, some computer vendors have come out with FORTRAN-77
compilers, but every one of them has a way of converting itself
back to a FORTRAN-66 compiler at the drop of an option card - to
compile DO loops the way God intended.
Even UNIX might not be as hard on Real Programmers as it once
was. The latest release of UNIX has the potential of an
operating system worthy of any Real Programmer - two different
and subtly incompatible user interfaces, an arcane and
complicated teletype driver, and virtual memory. If you ignore
the fact that its structured, even C programming can be
appreciated by Real Programmers. After all, there's no type
checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters
long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in
-n like having the best parts of FORTRAN and assembly language
in one place (not even talking about #define).
No, the future isn't all that bad. Why, in the past few years,
the popular press has even commented on the bright new crop of
computer nerds and hackers ([7] and [8]) leaving places like
Stanford and M.I.T for the Real World. From all the evidence,
the spirit of Real Programming lives on in these young men and
women. As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs,
and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers
willing to jump in and Solve the Problem, saving the
documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!
REFERENCES
Feirstein, B., Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, New York, Pocket
Books, 1982.
Wirth, N., Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, Prentice
Hall, 1976.
Xerox PARC editors ...
Finseth, C., Theory and Practice of Text Editors - or - a
Cookbook for an EMACS, B.S. thesis, MIT/LCS/TM-165,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1980.
Weinberg, G., The Psychology of Computer Programming, New York,
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971, page 110.
Dijkstra, E., On the GREEN Language Submitted to the DoD,
Sigplan notices, Volume 3, Number 10, October 1978.
Rose, Frank, Joy of Hacking, Science 82 Volume 3, Number 9,
November 1982, pages 58-66.
The Hacker Papers, Psychology Today, August 1980.
1 Actually this is also true of UNIX.
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