The DICT Development Group

  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 tuned into a state of tenseness 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' in Appendix A. The term itself was
      popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983 Datamation titled
      Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet
      and Internet in on-line form.
  
      Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search engine should
      turn up a copy.