- Mel Kaye
In programming folklore Mel Kaye is an archetypical
Real Programmer . Kaye was formerly a programmer at Royal McBee Computer Corporation.Ed Nather ’s "The Story of Mel" details Mel’s prowess at programming.Matt Crawford [http://groups.google.com/group/net.jokes/browse_thread/thread/936255290cc94a96 The realest programmer of all] Newsgroup: net.jokesNovember 20 , 1984.] Although originally written in prose, Nather’s story was repeatedly distributed by email — the resulting wrapped lines were taken to befree verse , and were kept in this form at many sites. [ [http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html The Story of Mel] free verse version]According to the
Jargon File appendix where the story may be found, Kaye is (or was) indeed a real person. In a FOLDOC document he is credited with doing the "bulk of the programming" on the Royal McBeeLGP-30 computer. In Nather's story, Kaye is portrayed as being prone to avoiding optimizing assemblers in favor of crafting code to take advantage of hardware quirks, for example taking advantage of the rotation of theLGP-30 'sdrum memory to avoid writingdelay loop s into the code. The story as written by Nather involved Kaye's work on porting ablackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system; company sales executives had requested the installation of acheat code allowing the customers to always win the game, a request that Kaye reluctantly acceded to, but accidentally changed the odds in favor of the dealer rather than the player. Subsequent to Kaye's departure, Nather examined the code and found out that an apparentinfinite loop had in fact been coded in such a way as to take advantage of a carry-overflow error, causing program control to shift past the loop to a jump instruction.The essay was originally published in the
usenet news group "net.jokes" onMay 21 ,1983 by utastro!nather (the then email address of Ed Nather).ee also
*
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal References
Further reading
* [http://rixstep.com/2/2/20071015,01.shtml The Story of Mel] original version
* [http://foldoc.org/?The+Story+of+Mel The Story Of Mel] prose from FOLDOC
* [http://wps.com/projects/LGP-21/mel-the-programmer.html Mel Kaye’s signature]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
