Real Programmer n. [indirectly, from the book "Real Men Don't Eat
   Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant
   attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by
   experience. The archetypal `Real Programmer' likes to program on the
   {bare metal} and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for
   every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and
   uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for
   wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been
   {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness just short of rupture. Real
   Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it was hard
   to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to understand."
   Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their
   spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A
   Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its
   crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee,
   hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other
   programmers -- because someday, somebody else might have to try to
   understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally
   consider it a {Good Thing} that there aren't many Real Programmers
   around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a
   Real Programmer, see "{The Story of Mel}" in Appendix A. The term itself
   was popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983 Datamation
   titled "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating
   on Usenet and Internet in on-line form. Typing "Real Programmers Don't
   Use Pascal" into a web search engine should turn up a copy.


Source: The Jargon File