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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

I'm not the OP and I wouldn't necessarily say I'm "offended" by it, but it's kinda gross and I dislike it, especially in a context of wanting more diversity in my field. Would the world be a tiny bit better without that line? I think so.

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It's an old riff on a book called "Real Men don't Eat Quiche" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche#Cu... which is a 1982 book that poked fun at hyperbolically conservative masculinity.

For the people who prefer to bikeshed around gender issues and don't know their history of programming languages: this is not just a pun on that book, but also on the essay "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" published in Datamation magazine in 1983. Which is by the way correct in pointing out that Real Men use neither Vi nor Emacs, but TECO. Oh yeah, and Real Man is a gender-neutral title in this context, like "fireman".

Call me a fireman and I’ll sock you in the nose. :)

We prefer “firefighter.”

There's not one context here.

That's not my reading of this use. The title of the 1982 book is using a silly statement to poke fun at the concept of masculinity. The jab in this article reads to me as accepting the concept of masculinity at face-value, and using it to poke fun at something in technology.

Went down the rabbit hole a bit (thanks Google) and found this thread from 2003 where someone said "real men use vi". https://www.redhat.com/archives/redhat-install-list/2003-Jul... I take it to mean real men do difficult things for no reason, which is not really a positive thing. A 2008 article updated the phrase to "real men and women use vi", still as hyperbole. http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/10/01/vim-tip... I guess the posted article didn't get the memo and still used the men-only version in 2011. But I guess you're right about this particular article, it's too easy to read it "straight".

It's a wonderful article about how low level assembly and C programs work on linux, and somehow HN gets caught up on a single intended-to-be-funny hyperbole, effectively turning it into a gender debate...

I think you're reading way too deep into this.

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