I was just thinking about the tools one can use to write programs. Sure text editors are not especially great compared to professional IDEs like Visual Studio. But somehow I had to think about punch cards and that it probably required much more discipline to program with these. One hole punched at the wrong place… to bad, start over with a new card.
Though thought patters only known to unconscious regions of my brain I remembered a nice xkcd comic: Real Programmers. In there someone says "Real programmers use cat". Hm, that is as low level as I could imagine to go with software. But what if even cat isn't there to help you? What if you attack a server and for some unknown reason get a root shell with a full gcc environment but without cat?
gcc -x c -
This will instruct gcc to read a C programm (-x c) from standard input (the last -). Now you can write down your program line by line. Made an error in the line above? To bad, start over with a new program. :)
Well, it's not as cool as using a magnetized needle but I'm sure it's a nice toy for real programmers. Now, I think I just invented another discipline real programmers can compete in: line buffered programming. Thank good I'm not one of them…
ps.: The really real programmers can write line buffered Java.
pps.: I'm currently writing my bachelor thesis. So, please don't be surprised if some craziness lacks out of my skull here and there…