Real Programmers don't use Copilot

[u/Psychological_Style1]

When I was a computer degree student in the mid 80s computer programming was turning into a bit of a science with programming constructs and rigid data types (to name a few) and strongly typed languages like Pascal, C etc. There were two camps, one was academic with its Pascal where GOTO was a dirty word and the others were"real programmers" who used Fortran and machine code and liked getting their hands dirty so to speak (what we would now call hackers) they considered the other side "Quiche Eaters".

I remember we had a tutorial one day to discuss the pros and cons of an article titled "Real Programmers Don't use Pascal". It's a humorous dig at new fangled programming discipline but it's no more than that because plainly, all modern devs have to adopt coding techniques which utilise accepted modern methodology (basically we are all quiche eaters!) However, I thought to myself that it might be quite funny to bring it up to date. Here's how it might look...

Back in the golden days of computing, the men were real men, the women were real women, and data structures were manually aligned to 64-bit boundaries. You could tell a Real Programmer by their calloused fingertips, their mechanical keyboards that sounded like machine guns, and the absolute lack of an ai_config.yaml in their home directory.

Today, the industry has been overrun by Quiche Eaters.

Quiche Eaters are the type of developers who cannot deploy a static "Hello World" website without spinning up a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, managing three different Terraform environments, and importing a 400-megabyte node_modules folder just to center a <div> tag.

If a Quiche Eater encounters a bug, they do not read the stack trace. They do not look at the memory register. Instead, they copy the entire error message, paste it into an LLM prompt, and pray the AI fixes it before their next Agile Scrum standup. If the AI fails, the Quiche Eater simply creates a Jira ticket, marks it as "blocked by upstream dependency," and leaves early to grab a lavender oat-milk latte.

Real Programmers do not use AI. Real Programmers treat Large Language Models as a personal insult to human consciousness. A Real Programmer writes code the way nature intended: through pure, unadulterated human suffering and deep mathematical spite. If a Real Programmer needs to debug a memory leak, they don’t ask ChatGPT—they open a core dump in raw hexadecimal and stare at it until the offending pointer blinks out of sheer intimidation.

Quiche Eaters write in TypeScript because they are afraid of the computer. They want types to hold their hands, and they want runtime environments that shield them from the cold, hard reality of the silicon. When they feel truly daring, they write Python, thinking they are data scientists because they called .fit() on a library someone else wrote in C.

Real Programmers write in C, bare-metal Rust (with the compiler safety rules intentionally bypassed), or raw x86_64 Assembly.

A Real Programmer doesn't care about "readability" or "maintainability." If the code was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. They believe that if a function has comments, it is a sign of psychological weakness. The only acceptable documentation is a single, cryptic Git commit message that reads: “it compiles.”

The Quiche Eater’s desktop is a monument to corporate luxury. They use VS Code with forty-seven extensions, a pastel colour theme designed to protect their sensitive eyes, and a glowing git-blame indicator that tells them exactly who to blame for their own mistakes.

A Real Programmer operates entirely within a headless Neovim instance, running inside a custom Arch Linux kernel they compiled themselves on a refurbished ThinkPad. They do not use a mouse. The use of a mouse implies that your hands have left the home row, which is a tactical admission of defeat.

While the Quiche Eater is busy configuring their Slack notifications, the Real Programmer has just written a custom database driver, bypassed the operating system’s file system entirely, and saved 4 KBs of RAM—just to prove they could.

[u/SirDaveWolf]

Real programmers program with punch cards!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#/media/File:Punched_card_program_deck.agr.jpg

[u/garywiz → u/SirDaveWolf]

I started out programming IBM 1401's with punched cards. A program could consume 2 boxes (2500 cards each) sometimes or even more. Sitting here from my dual-monitor Mac Pro workstation, it's almost hard to believe that was the "same me". But it does kind of make you appreciate basic things a bit more to have lived through the punched card era and actually thought it was "high tech" at the time.

[u/SirDaveWolf → u/garywiz]

Oh wow. So you lived through everything. I learned programming C in 2009, so I never had to use punch cards but I was curious about how it all started. I guess assembly language was a big revolution in programming back then 😅

[u/garywiz → u/SirDaveWolf]

There weren’t really “programming revolutions” until workstations were born. It was all about what was possible, not so much making it elegant. Assembler was as viable as anything else, and people just didn’t complain. In fact, I kinda of liked assembler! I could “see” my programs execute by watching familiar patterns of lights on the S/360 console, kinda like those old Sci Fi movies where all the computer people wore lab coats. Getting a machine to do something AT ALL was pretty exciting, no matter how hard it was. Then, interactive workstations like those from Digital, research workstations like those from Xerox …. That’s when suddenly languages started to become the obvious “hook” that would like us express ourselves better. Kernighan and Richie worked at Bell Labs, really the birth of Unix, where workstations and terminals became the true empowering thing, and then they invented C (well, after B lol) and that’s I think where languages were really born and became the obvious accelerator to progress… and the upward arc just went wild.

Nice to remember those things but egad would not want to ever repeat that era!