Abstract :
The author describes a career-journey that began with the maintenance of obsolete, poorly structured programs that came with almost no documentation. But he survived and moved on to work with and observe “real” programming practices in several companies. He describes how the “real” programming profession evolved and expanded into the mainstream of the software industry. E. Post´s article “Real Programmers Don´t Use Pascal” (Datamation, 1983) sent the overriding message that, despite the efforts of that day´s quiche-eating programmers, real programming took real talent and, if done correctly, led to fun, wealth, and job security. Borland recently released a new, object-oriented version of Pascal called Delphi. It´s far removed from the simplistic language Niklaus Wirth conceived; it´s a pleasure to use, and it commands good contracting rates
Keywords :
Pascal; object-oriented languages; professional aspects; programming; software maintenance; Delphi; Pascal; career; contracting rates; object-oriented version; obsolete programs; poorly structured programs; programming profession; real programming; software industry; software maintenance; Assembly; Core dumps; Documentation; Engineering profession; Hardware; Operating systems; Parallel processing; Programming profession; Reverse engineering; Uninterruptible power systems;