Marcos Duran
Wendy Nather40 years ago, my dad went viral on Usenet with this little gem: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
I found out recently (thanks @rmd1023) that there’s been a resurgence of interest and discussion of the story’s history, which I know would have tickled my dad immensely. https://www.metafilter.com/199386/40th-Anniversary-of-The-Story-of-Mel-Hacker-folklore
Even YouTube discussions: https://youtu.be/sB1lRnZVv30
Story of Mel - Computerphile
Trivia: my dad claimed that the version with his prose broken into free verse wasn’t his doing — but that’s exactly the way he wrote other prose prior to running it through nroff/troff. He broke up his sentences into phrases on separate lines because it made it easier to edit, and the formatter would get rid of all the line breaks afterwards anyway. So maybe he misremembered how he wrote it. 🤷🏻♀️
My dad hadn’t had any contact with Mel since the days depicted in the story, until sometime in 2013, when out of the blue he got an email that said, “So, I hear you’ve been talking about me on the Internet …”
At that point my dad was too debilitated from a stroke to be able to spend much time at his computer, but at least they were back in contact after all those years.
My dad passed away in 2014, but he would have loved to quibble and chat with all the folks dissecting this work now.
One more story: my dad used to program in his head. He’d sit in his armchair, fingers steepled, and stare off into space for hours. Then he’d get up, go to his PC, and type it all in.
Same thing with debugging. He’d get a call from someone describing a problem with the software, he’d sit down and think for a while, and then go “Ah!” and go sit down to fix it.
Of course, those were simpler days …
Mike P@wendynather I program in my head, too. I find that going for a walk in the countryside is the best way to do it.
Sometimes I program in my sleep. If I hold a problem in my mind as I'm drifting off, I often find I wake up knowing the answer.
Greg Bell@wendynather people with expansive, well-ordered working memory are amazing to me, on the order of magicians
Steve Gayner@wendynather
Because he was logician; the programming was merely his language to realize his thoughts. The definition of "good programmer" is not how good is the syntax, but how good is the logic.
Because he was logician; the programming was merely his language to realize his thoughts. The definition of "good programmer" is not how good is the syntax, but how good is the logic.
synlogic@wendynather love it! yep I do similar. blessed to have a kind of visual "desktop/screen" in my mind when I want it, where I can sketch/see code, text drafts etc. not perfect and not unlimited capacity, but decent enough to help
Holir_@wendynather A real wizard.
Nonya Bidniss 🥥🌴@wendynather Aside: I have that shirt and love wearing it here in AL 😏 I think our dads might have had a lot in common; he was a chemist and early programmer of NMR machines in the 60s and even after he retired decades later companies contracted him to figure out their ancient code.
@Nonya_Bidniss Totally! My dad started out with a BA in English, became a nuclear physicist, then an inventor, then a programmer, and spent the rest of his career as an astronomer, computerizing the telescopes in various locations. Some of his software is still in use today.
Michael Olsen@wendynather @Nonya_Bidniss this is an incredible story and legacy! You sound like a proud daughter
@corsairmo @Nonya_Bidniss He literally got me started in my career, by making me learn BASIC at the ripe old age of 12 😆
rsalz@wendynather Wow, I never made the connection. I feel dumb. I really liked his "put a query on the net" poem.
@rsalz Yes, I was going to get around to digging that one up too!
plinth@wendynather Didn't he do some of the telescope control in FORTH?
The Mel story reminds me of when one of my CS professors talked with reverence about how Alan Turing wrote self-modifying assembly language and I thought, "isn't that how it's done when your processor sucks?" I had been writing self-modifying code for the Apple II for 5 years at that point.
The Mel story reminds me of when one of my CS professors talked with reverence about how Alan Turing wrote self-modifying assembly language and I thought, "isn't that how it's done when your processor sucks?" I had been writing self-modifying code for the Apple II for 5 years at that point.
@plinth I don’t know the details myself, but it wouldn’t surprise me. He used whatever worked for the job to be done, but he also had some strong prejudices (CLI only, he hated Windows).
HTTP 1.1/418 Teapot@wendynather I dropped a link to this post/thread into the MeFi post.
@rmd1023 You da best, thank you 💚
The ol' tealeg 🐡@wendynather I have that in hard copy from back in the day. Nice to see the jargon file, and it's associated lore still circulating out there.
@tealeg Funny story: ESR didn’t know it was my dad when he added the story to the Hacker’s Dictionary 😆
@wendynather I’m (just) old enough that I interacted with some real ol’ time hackers early in my career. I was given the Hacker’s Dictionary to help me understand what the hell they were talking about. What I always loved about that story is how creativity comes from constraints. Perhaps your dad’s formatting is itself an example of that kind.
Joey Gibson 
@tealeg I printed out many items from the Jargon File and hung them in my office back around 1991. Of course, that was back when lowly developers still *had* offices.
@joeygibson I’ve been working remotely for most of the last 15 years, I have my own office :-) I have John McCarthy and Djikstra on my walls. The hackers dictionary is in the bookcase
@tealeg I've been 100% remote for three years, and about 85% remote in the four years prior to that. While part of me misses The Old Days™, back in the early 90s, when I had a spacious office, with floor-to-ceiling, windows, and a door that closed, I wouldn't trade that for what I have now.
Doctor Memory@wendynather !!! TIL, wow.
Ben Curthoys@wendynather Mel the Real Programmer! I can't remember a time when I didn't know that story. I must have been emailed it in the late 90s...
@wendynather Will Mastodon throw up the person who should have mounted a scratch monkey as an encore?
apgarcia@wendynather i was first told about this story by @ber around 1999 -- he told me i had to read it. legendary!
Sterling
Eleanor Saitta@wendynather
Oh, it's really beautiful to see a bit behind that story. I've loved it from the first time I read it
Oh, it's really beautiful to see a bit behind that story. I've loved it from the first time I read it
Martin Boller 
@wendynather Lovely little story.
Habrok
leyrer
Andrew 🌻 Brandt 🐇@wendynather that's amazing. Does he still have the program? Does the machine still exist?
@threatresearch I doubt it, but I don’t know — both of them have since passed away
Ellie@wendynather This is a story we all know and hold dear.
Josh Justice@wendynather mel! i've read that story several times over the years.
oisin@wendynather I remember reading that when it was in the original prose format 😀
justin ferguson
Dale Hagglund@wendynather I loved that article since I first read it, probably in the late 80s or early 90s. It's now a bit hard to explain to "kids these days", but I'm just old enough to be able to appreciate the details to at least some degree.
Petrichor ᚄᚔᚅᚐᚁᚆᚃᚒᚔᚂ@sinabhfuil Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you!
@wendynather OMG this is one of my favorite stories ever! Of course I only knew it from 30 years ago...
GQB@wendynather @siracusa I have never seen such a poetic and detailed description of what it was like to program early computers, in machine language!
@GQB He really had a gift for writing. He originally wanted to write science fiction for a living, but someone offered him a job as a nuclear physicist, and he went with that instead.
@wendynather @siracusa And it even contains a link at the very end with the full programming manual for the machine!
Keith Kastorff@wendynather @siracusa Thanks for boosting this. Spent a lot of time on USENET at one time. We had some nice communities on comp.sys.mac. And the usual trolling, spamming, and vitriol. In other words, the Internet has always been the same. I even did some ML coding back then, but mostly assembly.
Dan Kennedy 
@wendynather I have a baseball poem somewhere about 'how today's game isn't played the right way', and it was written in 1920-something. This is great, the evergreen programming language generation argument, and immediately reminded me of it.
Guillaume Laurent@wendynather I had read this story many years ago, and enjoyed it very much. Thank you for sharing this ☺️.