The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer

[xzid]

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

This is one of the coolest programming articles I've read. I think we can all learn something from Mel.

TL;DR: we all suck, ASM is for n00bs.

[bubzuru]

will read it now 

[bubzuru]

makes you think how easy we have it

my fav quotes

Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code", he asked, "what good is it?"

The new computer had a one-plus-one
     addressing scheme,
     in which each machine instruction,
     in addition to the operation code
     and the address of the needed operand,
     had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
     the next instruction was located.

     In modern parlance,
     every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
     Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it

He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory --- the largest locations the instructions could address --- so, after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way.

nice read +1

[ca0s]

Magnífico.

[FuyuKitsune]

It's a cool story, I read it when I was going through The Jargon File

[daedalus]

in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software

Scoot over, Homer! Thanks for posting.

[techb]

Code: [Select]

Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Sorry admins lol.

[L0rd_M@dness]

There are many amazing programmers all around the globe from which you'll never even hear. I know it because I know someone just like Mel.
Also ASM does NOT SUCK, it's just another edition for machine language they're very close. If you know the highs and lows of asm, with a little more practice and a little more knowledge about the hardware, you can write machine code.

[Live Wire]

That was fairly cool. I love how their "ethics" was fulfilled when the computer cheated lol

[Conch]

Code: [Select]

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.
     Machine Code.
     Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
     Directly.
[code]

LOL Love this.