Dan Byström’s Bwain

I just happened to notice that the legendary text “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal” was published exactly 25 years ago this month (and I just have a couple of hours left before this month ends, so I thouht I had to write up something quickly). You can often find it on the Net filed under “humor”. This can, of course, only be done by Quiche Eaters! Sometimes someone has replaced Pascal with Visual Basic. I have no problem with that. 🙂

Among all the words of wisdom, I found these:

• Real Programmers aren’t afraid to use GOTOs.
• Real Programmers can write five page long DO loops without getting confused.
• Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF statements– they make the code more interesting.
• Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they can save 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop.
• Real Programmers don’t need comments– the code is obvious.
• Since Fortran doesn’t have a structured IF, REPEAT … UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don’t have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using assigned GOTOs.

I guess that the number of programmers out there who have written (or even know what it means to write) arithmetic IF-statements or self-modifying code are decreasing rapidly by the day. And writing a five page long DO loops without getting confused may be a cool party trick, but nothing to applause in real work. But the remaining two points are something I’d like to comment!

Real Programmers aren’t afraid to use GOTOs

Well, why on earth should they be? Really? This “truth” seems to be something that all student know by heart. Thou shalt not use GOTO. Thou shalt not use GOTO. Without even understanding why GOTO was such a big problem in the first place. In a structured language it is not. How could it be that more students seem to know about this silly “non-problem” while at the same time failing to understand the most fundamental thing about programming: Thou shalt never duplicate code. Thou shalt not use copy-and-paste. I just wonder…

Real Programmers don’t need comments– the code is obvious

I think this is almost true! It only needs slight modification:

Real Programmes write code in such a way that the code becomes obvious

I have come to realise that when I download a piece of code from the Net, the first thing I usually have to do is delete all the comments so that I can read the code!!! Most of the time, comments seem to have been put there just “because you must write comments”. Then after a time, changes are made to the code and the comments are not updated, leaving any reader totally confused! Skip the comments and write clean code with long descriptive methods and variable names I say!

(This goes for much of the documentation too, I think. The code is the best documentations because it is “the truth”! This is one of the reasons Tests (Test Driven Development) is such a great thing: you get “true documentation” for free.)