

The story of Mel (1983) - vaksel
http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html

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mahmud
The story of Mel 2.0:

He spends 16 hour days fighting with browser incompatibilities, catching up
with an ADHD-afflicted industry, answers massive amounts of emails, and does
more SEO than coding.

~~~
blhack
This is all done at the threat of being replaced by a PHB's 16 year old "whiz-
kid" nephew who "knows a lot about computers" and is "always playing with
those things".

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gcv
Since is this repost made #1 on the front page, two other links are worth
noting.

The newline-mangled, and more fun free-verse version:
<http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html>

The Wikipedia article about Mel: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Kaye>

~~~
sp332
The free-verse version really is better.

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wglb
I do enjoy this story, even if it is oft repeated.

I worked with a fellow once who very much reminded me of mel. He once built a
telephone controller with an intel 4004 because the office he was working in
needed the features it provided.

There probably nothing this fellow couldn't program.

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youngian
I've seen this story before, and I just don't get it. Mel doesn't sound to me
like a "Real Programmer." He sounds like the kind of person I wouldn't even
consider hiring or collaborating with. I would have spent most of the
debugging process muttering curses at Mel for writing undocumented,
unreliable, invalid, highly fragile code.

Here's my version of a "Real Programmer": When Melanie left the company, I dug
into her code to try to add the cheat feature. Turns out she had split
everything up by functionality so that all the parts of the complex
application were carefully encapsulated, and I only had to modify a couple
methods. They were carefully commented, so I was able to grok the code just by
skimming it. Once I made the changes, I added a couple more unit tests to the
thorough test suite Melanie had left behind, and confident that the program
still worked, I went home early.

I think times have changed...

~~~
gamache
HA, "methods". This was the late 50's, kiddo. OO was fifteen years off...
hell, high level languages were not even there yet. You were lucky if your
computer had a keyboard. Your precious "unit tests" would have also been
written in hex, and "Melanie's" carefully factored code would spend most of
its time thrashing the stack, if the LGP-30 had one. And it didn't.

Anyway, to understand the context of this article, you need to read the
"parent post" called "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal":
<http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/real.programmers.html>

And to understand that, check on the grandparent, not a post but a book: _Real
Men Don't Eat Quiche_
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Dont_Eat_Quiche>).

~~~
andreyf
Wikipedia link missing an apostrophe:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche>

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quizzical
Mel was a requirements driven programmer that had the luxury of only having to
write code for one platform at a time. None of his code as described sounds
possible to abstract and maintain across platforms. I'm going to guess he
evolved towards hardware engineering rather than software engineering.

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vinutheraj
Hey Mel, are you out there somewhere ? Are you here ?!

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billpg
I hope I never have to work with that guy. He sounds ghastly.

