Real Programmers Don’t Use PASCAL

Copyright (c) 1982 by Ed Post, Graphic Software Systems, P.O. Box 673,
25117 S.W. Parkway, Wilsonville, OR 97070

Back in the good old days–the “Golden Era” of computers — it was
easy to separate the 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 that didn’t. A real computer programmer said
things like “DO 10 I=1,10″ and “ABEND” (they actually talked in
capital letters, you understand), and 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 even understand their very own
Personal Computer. The Real Programmer is in danger of becoming
extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with
TRASH-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 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 a considerable salary savings).

LANGUAGES

The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the
programming language he (or she) uses. 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 name, pronouncing it ‘Virt’,
or call be by value, ‘Worth’.” One can tell immediately from this
comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only
parameter-passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is
call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 FORTRAN-G and like
compilers. Real programmers don’t need all these 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 acounting (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, it isn’t worth doing.

STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING

The academics in computer science have gotten 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 which 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 the Structured Coding in
the world won’t help you solve a problem 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,
  they can be simulated when necessary 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. Wirth (the above-mentioned Quiche Eater)
actually wrote 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 — these are all 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 on the first letter of the (six character) variable name.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

What kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M?
God forbid — CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system.
Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and
use 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 his
JCL manual. A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the
manual at all. A 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 is a truly remarkable operating system. It’s possible to
destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in
the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the
system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a
Timesharing System that runs on OS\370, but after careful study I have
come to the conclusion that they were mistaken.

PROGRAMMING TOOLS

What kind 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 it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was
memory — it didn’t go away when the power went off. Today, memory
either forgets things when you don’t want it to, or remembers things
long after they’re better forgotten.) Legend has it that Seymore Cray,
inventor of the Cray I supercomputer and most of Control Data’s
computers, actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600
in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on.
Seymore, needless to say, is a Real Programmer.

One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for
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 phone, 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 phone. The
moral of this 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 companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers
standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work
in doesn’t contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this
situation has to do his 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 Center for use on their Alto
and Dorado computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would
ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and
would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse.

Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated
into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems –
EMACS and VI being two. The problem with these editors is that Real
Programmers consider “what you see is what you get” to be just as bad
a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No the Real Programmer
wants a “you asked for it, you got it” text editor–complicated,
cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, 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 even 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 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 source code is
no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this,
no manager would even think of sending anything 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”.

Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers:

• FORTRAN preprocessors like MORTRAN and RATFOR. The
  Cuisinarts of programming–great for making Quiche.
  See 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 EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify
  the operating system code with negative subscripts.
  Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient.

• Source code maintenance systems. A Real Programmer
  keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it
  implies that its owner cannot leave his important
  programs unguarded [5].

THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK

Where does the typical 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-shaking
importance (literally!).

• Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National
  Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run
  on Cray I 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 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 navigation 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 within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is
going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for
navigation to these tolerances.

As you can tell, many of the world’s 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
Programmer 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”. For a while, it
seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against
all the precepts of Real Programming–a language with structure, a
language with data types, strong typing, and semicolons. In short, a
language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real
Programmer. Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD has enough
interesting features to make it approachable–it’s incredibly complex,
includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging
memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn’t like it [6]. (Dijkstra, as I;m
sure you know, was the author of “GoTos Considered Harmful”–a
landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by PASCAL
programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real
Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

The Real Programmer might compromise his 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 building 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.) Everyone working 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, mostly because
nobody has found a use for computer graphics yet. On the other hand,
all computer graphics 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. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays
him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway (although he is
careful not to express this opinion out loud). Occasionally, the 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 his simulations printed
  on 11×14 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 himself, because he never could 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 one on the staff,
it’s best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his
work done.

The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a
computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are:

• Listings of all 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
  butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the
  cups will contain Orange Crush.

• Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the
  OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open
  to some particularly interesting pages.

• Taped to the wall is a lineprinter Snoopy calendar
  of the year 1969.

• Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for
  peanut butter filled cheese bars–the type that are
  made pre-stale at the bakery so they can’t get any
  worse while waiting in the vending machine.

• Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a
  stash of double-stuffed Oreos for special
  occasions.

• Underneath the Oreos is a flowcharting template,
  left there by the previous occupant of the office.
  (Real Programmers write programs, not
  documentation. Leave that to the maintenance
  people.)

The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at
a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way.
Bad response time doesn’t bother the Real Programmer — it gives him a
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 the small but interesting part
of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in
the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only
impresses the hell out of his manager, who was despairing of ever
getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for
not doing the documentation. In general:

• No Real Programmer works 9 to 5 (unless it’s the
  ones at night).

• Real Programmers don’t wear neckties.
• Real Programmers don’t wear high-heeled shoes.
• Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch [9].

• Real Programmers might or might not know their
  spouse’s name. They do, however, know the entire
  ASCII (or EBCDIC) code table.

• Real Programmers don’t know how to cook. Grocery
  stores aren’t open at three 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 structured coding
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 into a FORTRAN 66 compiler at the drop
of an option card — to compile DO loops as God meant them to be.

Even Unix might not be as bad 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 it’s “structured”, even
‘C’ programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: 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 — like having the best parts of FORTRAN and assembly
language in one place (not to mention some of the more creative uses
for #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 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!

ACKNOWLEGEMENT

I would like to thank Jan E., Dave S., Rich G., Rich E., for their
help in characterizing the Real Programmer, Kathy E. for putting up
with it, and atd!avsdS:mark for the initial inspiration.

[DEC hacker note: this came from a paper that surfaced in Bedford,
unsigned. The author apparently is a Unix hacker (note the node
name). Does anyone know where this came from?]

REFERENCES

• [1] Feirstein, B., “Real Men don’t Eat Quiche”, New
  York, Pocket Books, 1982.

• [2] Wirth, N., “Algorithms + Data Structures =
  Programs”, Prentice Hall, 1976.

• [3] Ilson, R., “Recent Research in Text Processing”,
  IEEE Trans. Prof. Commun., Vol. PC-23, No. 4,
  Dec. 4, 1980.

• [4] Finseth, C., “Theory and Practice of Text Editors –
  or — a Cookbook for an EMACS”, B.S. Thesis,
  MIT/LCS/PM-165, Massachusetts Institute of
  Technology, May 1980.

• [5] Weinberg, G., “The Psychology of Computer
  Programming”, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold,
  1971, p. 110.

• [6] Dijkstra, E., “On the GREEN language submitted to
  the DoD”, Sigplan notices, Vol. 3 No. 10, Oct
  1978.

• [7] Rose, Frank, “Joy of Hacking”, Science 82, Vol. 3
  No. 9, Nov 82, pp. 58-66.

• [8] “The Hacker Papers”, Psychology Today, August 1980.

• [9] sdcarl!lin, “Real Programmers”, UUCP-net, Thu Oct
  21 16:55:16 1982