
Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982) - BlackLamb
http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers
======
baldfat
This is a great sarcasm piece that seems timeless.

"Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused."

"Real Programmers don't need comments -- the code is obvious."

"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."

"At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying ``Poor George. And he
almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.''

------
huhtenberg
> _Compilers with array bounds checking (...) stifle creativity, (...) and
> make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative
> subscripts._

Absolute classic. The words to live by.

~~~
code_sterling
I'm going to be honest, I miss those days. Granted I used to have to wipe my
machine every month at least, and things became horribly corrupt, but it was
fun.

------
LukeShu
This is the post referenced in the opening of The Story of Mel; which may also
be of interest. [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-
mel.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)

~~~
veddox
Both are great epics of hacking history. I just wonder whether there are any
more?

~~~
moyix
Sure; the 500 mile email comes to mind (it gets reposted here periodically):

[http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

------
donatj
One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day,
"Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very
little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

~~~
derrickdirge
I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a
Delphi project that people speak this highly of.

~~~
lbruder
The one thing Delphi really did wrong was to make GUI programming too easy. It
was just too simple, too tempting, to just put all your code into your
MainForm.pas, making it grow to over 10'000 LOC. If (and only if) the
programmers took care to avoid code duplication and cared about writing good,
solid code, Delphi rocked. Just like Lazarus ([http://www.lazarus-
ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)) does today. One of my weapons of
choice nowadays when it comes to GUI development.

~~~
giancarlostoro
The only thing I wish it had is more documentation for those of us who never
did any Pascal. I love Lazarus too, but it's quite a lot to take in when
you're used to other languages. I basically have to "Guess" how to write code,
which can become a lot more work with Delphi / FreePascal.

~~~
lbruder
Try to get your hands on an old copy of Delphi 1 or 2. Thousands of pages of
documentation in PDF format. Docs used to be so much better back then, it's
sad. I still have a copy of Delphi 7 lying around just because the help system
was/is so good.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Sadly I was more concerned about FreePascal than Delphi as well. But yeah,
it's sad that documentation is dead these days.

------
squidfood
One irony is that modern Fortran is quite a nice language to work with. As
long as you can just call, and don't actually have to work on, all the '77
numerical libraries that the Real Programmers put together.

~~~
JupiterMoon
This is true. I would still use it -- except that python is an even nicer
language to work with and via numpy and scipy lots of those library are nicely
wrapped.

------
aflinik
Although it's meant to be sarcastic, I believe it nicely exposes typical
things developers used to argue about back then, not that different from
modern arguments about JS vs compiled-to-js, elixir vs erlang, GC vs manual
memory management, etc.

Anybody knows some more serious piece from those times that would show the
actual arguments of, say, PASCAL opponents?

~~~
Jtsummers
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-
pasc...](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html)

By Brian Kernighan

This was written in 1981, so a lot changed after he wrote this.

~~~
mariuz
He describes an old pascal dialect
[http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Pro...](http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language)

------
octetta
Already amused by the comments based only on the title but not on the content:

"Real Commenters don't read the contents".

------
angrycoder
Was this written as satire back in 1982? Because it is great when read as
satire.

As a real thing written by a real person, not so much.

~~~
baldfat
[http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers](http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers)

Key word in the url "humor"

------
drostie
Related: Real Men Don't Play GURPS:
[http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm](http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm)
(slight trigger warning: the "Real Men use swords to..." list ends on a line
which can be read as quite rapey, though I don't think it was intended that
way.)

(Note: it is a Windows-1292 document, correctly identified that way by a
<meta> tag, which is incorrectly given a UTF-8 charset by a Content Type
header. Therefore if the weird symbols are too distracting, you can save it to
the hard drive and load it into a browser from there, and the symbols will
resolve properly.)

It is worth reading for the line, "If you can't do it with a sword, do it with
a fireball. If you can't do it with a fireball, it isn't worth doing."

------
bcrescimanno
I immediately thought of Bret Victor's wonderful talk on, 'The Future of
Programming'

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4)

------
peterwwillis
I am outraged by all this quiche-shaming.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
It's a cheese-and-egg pie, what's not to love about quiche?

~~~
JupiterMoon
Often cooked with ham. I mean it's basically an improved omelette...

------
nickysielicki
I'm surprised how well the letter 'o' looks as a bullet point.

------
jhallenworld
Real programmers should definitely try to use TECO. It can be described as a
screen editor, but with no screen. Instead you need a good imagination.

~~~
leni536
If anybody wants to try:

[https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC](https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC)

------
nijiko
>thcught

you almost got me c, you almost, got me.

------
batrat
I did 4 years in high school.

------
frozenport
Today this is true for a more obvious reason; Pascal is legacy.

~~~
eli
It's not a very popular language, but people are still starting new projects
in flavors of Pascal. Have you seen [http://www.lazarus-
ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?

------
adolgert
"Eating quiche" used to be slang for a sexual act. It's when the joke is most
funny that we need to recognize mechanisms of exclusion.

~~~
etjossem
The reference is pretty clearly to "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" (1982), which
was itself a satire of exclusionary masculinity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche)

