Idiomer
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English · Slang Attested

Real Programmer

In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.

Meaning · English

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.

Register: slang

Where it’s used: Used American English

Examples

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 ...

Usage example from English Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Adapted from English Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30 via kaikki.org).

Common questions

What does “Real Programmer” mean?

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.

Is “Real Programmer” formal or informal?

Real Programmer is generally slang.