Real Programmer

Real Programmer n.   [indirectly, from the book
   "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of
   hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that
   is arrogant even when justified by experience.  The archetypal
   `Real Programmer' likes to program on the {bare metal} and is
   very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine
   he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a
   debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for
   wimps.  Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't
   been {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness just short of
   rupture.  Real Programmers never use comments or write
   documentation: "If it was hard to write", says the Real
   Programmer, "it should be hard to understand."  Real Programmers
   can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets;
   in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so.  A Real
   Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its
   crockishness appalls.  Real Programmers live on junk food and
   coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap
   out of other programmers -- because someday, somebody else might
   have to try to understand their code in order to change it.  Their
   successors generally consider it a {Good Thing} that there
   aren't many Real Programmers around any more.  For a famous (and
   somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see
   "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.
   The term itself was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article
   "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still
   circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.