Quote:
Originally Posted by IanD
"Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language"
From the original:
"Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL"
Note: this will mean nothing to you unless you are:
a) A programmer
b) Over 40 (at least!)
But ... if you qualify ... and I do  ... it's chuffin' hilarious. |
I qualify.
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.
At the bank I once worked for, JCL was a black art. The COBOL programmers all used someone else's canned procs on their jobs, and wouldn't go near writing their own. Eight statements in the language, but terra incognita to all. (I once got an indignant phone call from the Applications Programming VP because I modified the JCL on one of my jobs to run it at a higher priority. I wasn't actually one of the programmers, or even on the DP staff. I don't know whether he was more perturbed by the fact it had been done or the someone who
wasn't a DP staffer did it.
And IBM manuals were their own wonderland. IBM systems were thoroughly documented, and the documentation was accurate, but first you had to understand it. They were written in IBMspeak, and when you got an an error message, the manual often pointed you at another manual you didn't have, no matter how many you accumulated. (I have never seen a
complete set of IBM 370 manuals.)
VSAM errors.
Arghhh!
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.
I first encountered TECO at the above mentioned bank, on the DEC minis. (TECO was DEC specific. It did not run on IBM systems.) It's considered an example of a "write only" language. The original version of the Emacs editor written by Richard M. Stallman was in TECO. TECO was installed on the DEC machine used at the MIT AI Lab where Stallman worked, and various folks had written TECO macro packages to ease using it. Stallman and Guy Steele (mostly Stallman), collected and merged the packages and gave them a consistent interface. The result was Editing MACroS, or emacs, and rapidly became the standard editor at the labs. Stallman realized how successful his efforts had been when
he no longer recalled how to do things in raw TECO.
When TECO went away, Stallman rewrote Emacs in LISP, and the current Gnu Emacs flavor is essentially a Lisp interpreter, with most of the editor written in the version of Lisp it interprets. If you know Emacs Lisp, you can get it to do almost anything, and people have. Old timers working on Unix systems would run Emacs when they sat down at the terminal, and do everything from within it.
You can still get TECO for the PC, and there are versions that run under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X. See
http://almy.us/teco.html
The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal.
Surrounding this terminal are:
o Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office.
There was a eulogy on line for a legendary analog systems designer who worked for National Semiconductor. His office was like that. His filing system was by date and time, and he could pick the appropriate stack and know how far down in the pile the particular document was. He could find things very quickly. Fortunately, no one
else ever had to locate a document in his office.
______
Dennis