The Story of Mel
This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together. [1992 postscript --- the author writes: "The original submission to the net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it --- it was straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow."]
The Story of Mel The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983. A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in FORTRAN. Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
saved by
related reading
- Loper OS >> The Wisdom of Erik Naggumloper-os.org
- how I think when I think about programming - alice mazalicemaz.com
- Intro - Putting the "You" in CPUcpu.land
- 100R - weathering software winter100r.ca
- Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Softwarejoelonsoftware.com
- What I Worked Onpaulgraham.com
- Hackers and Painterspaulgraham.com
- E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The Humble Programmer (EWD 340)cs.utexas.edu
- Folklore.org: -2000 Lines Of Codefolklore.org
- 100R - weathering software winter100r.co
- Phrack Prophile on Geraphrack.org
- One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languagesjames-iry.blogspot.com