There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with
FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They
often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other
hackers consider them a bit odd (see "[The Story of Mel, a
Real Programmer}" in Appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer
considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL
implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and
hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a
shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like "Pascal" and
"Ada", which don't give them the near-total freedom considered
necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language),
and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or
other traditional card walloper languages as a total and
unmitigated loss.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian
hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as
`Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the
sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as,
mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return
values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs,
gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar
Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything
and the cost of nothing".
One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example
that most newer languages, such as COBOL and Ada, are full
of unnecessary crocks. When the Right Thing has already
been done once, there is no justification for bogosity in newer
languages.
At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a coordinate
system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco,
`logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical
north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and
physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that,
by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.)
In giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco
restaurant, get onto El Camino Bignum going logical north."
Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from
worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost
directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North
American highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently
labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar
situation exists at MIT: Route 128 (famous for the electronics
industry that has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters circle
surrounding Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near the
coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the
two directions along this highway as `clockwise' and
`counterclockwise', but the road signs all say "north" and
"south", respectively. A hacker might describe these directions
as `logical north' and `logical south', to indicate that they
are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual
denotation for those words. (If you went logical south along the
entire length of route 128, you would start out going northwest,
curve around to the south, and finish headed due east, passing along
one infamous stretch of pavement that is simultaneously route 128
south and Interstate 93 north, and is signed as such!)