Word.ws English Dictionary

Real Programmer

Real Programmer noun: an archetypal highly skilled programmer, who eschews abstractions and convenient modern tools and methods of programming, instead preferring to use a manually-optimised low-level language or program directly in machine code for maximum performance.

Noun

Real Programmer (plural Real Programmers)

  1. (slang) An archetypal highly skilled programmer, who eschews abstractions and convenient modern tools and methods of programming, instead preferring to use a manually-optimised low-level language or program directly in machine code for maximum performance.
    • Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because ...1995, Andrew Davison, Humour the Computer, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 50
    • Julian Templeman first touched fingers to keypunch in 1972, punching Fortran code onto cards at college in London. Soon after, he moved on to Macro- 11 programming on PDP-11s. This qualifies him as a Real Programmer, and until recently, he had a PDP-11 in his garage to remind him of better times.2002, Julian Templeman, Andy Olsen, Microsoft Visual C++.NET Step by Step, →ISBN, page 618

Forms of Real Programmer

pluralReal Programmers
alternative formreal programmer

Questions about Real Programmer

What does Real Programmer mean?
Real Programmer means an archetypal highly skilled programmer, who eschews abstractions and convenient modern tools and methods of programming, instead preferring to use a manually-optimised low-level language or program directly in machine code for maximum performance.
What part of speech is Real Programmer?
Real Programmer is a noun.
What is the plural of Real Programmer?
The plural of Real Programmer is Real Programmers.

Words near Real Programmer in the dictionary

  1. real parts
  2. real person fiction
  3. real plane
  4. real planes
  5. real presence
  6. Real Programmer
  7. Real Programmers
  8. real projective plane
  9. real projective planes
  10. real properties
  11. real property

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Real Programmer (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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