Talk:The Story of Mel

Alternative version of story
I added the alternative link to The Story Of Mel, because screen readers using speech synthesizers cannot cope with the formatting used in the free-verse version. Most windows screen readers will always read the Â character as "A circumflex", so the text becomes unreadable. Graham 1 July 2005 10:13 (UTC)


 * Real Programmers use code monkeys to read their screen, damn it. And they like it! Project2501a 11:22, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by a code monkey? The article code monkey refers to snippets of code pasted together to make a program. Or am I just missing something :) - Graham/pianoman87 talk 12:43, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I suppose it would have helped if I read the article Real Programmer before typing the response above. :) Graham/pianoman87 talk 07:28, 31 October 2005 (UTC)


 * It's not only Windows readers that can't read the Jargon File formatting. It's useless on my Seamonkey running on Linux as well. The encoding says UTF-8, but a "HEAD http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html" will reveal that the page is presented as ISO-8859-1, regardless of the encoding directive at the top of the document. Therefore, I took the liberty of adding a link to the plain-text version that also has the merit of popping up as #1 on Google. The Jargon File reference should probably be removed entirely until ESR or whoever is maintaining it corrects the problem. leifbk 22:33, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
 * That plain text version sounds almost beautiful because the speech syntehsizer is emphasising all the punctuation. I've therefore removed the Jargon File link and cleaned up the references section. Graham 87 01:26, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Does he even exist?
Short answer: YES, but one can only wonder why he hasn't identified himself, he is famous, but nobody seems to have really met him in the last few decades. His name appears in a manual, and a USENET post... but beyond that we don't know anything about him (I mean we dont know what he looked like or who else was in his family, where he grew up, when he was born, etc) The stub tag prompts wikipedians to expand the page, but there are not any verifiable souces that have further info about him. If your name is mel kaye then leave a message on my talk page, or I'll have to fly to America to look you up in the phone book. This article is destined to be static for all eternity. MichaelBillington 04:49, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain I tracked him down using various publicly-available (government) primary sources, but I can't post it here because of WP:NOR and WP:BLP. Dave Blau (talk) 21:41, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Too much story?
Is there a reason for this article to include selections from the story? Why not just link to it and have it over with? It's not as though there's any analysis of how individual sections of the story reflect other known facts about Mel, because no one seems to know anything else about Mel. Dfeuer (talk) 15:14, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

"Free Verse" version must have been intentional
The article says,


 * Although originally written in prose, Nather’s story was repeatedly distributed by email — the resulting wrapped lines were taken to be free verse, and were kept in this form at many sites.

Which makes it sound like some email client's automatic line-wrapping routine created the "free verse" version. However, the lines are broken far too strategically, and not at a constant width, nor in the "comb" pattern that sometimes results from email. The source the article cites indicates that someone "hacked" the story into free verse, which makes more sense:


 * In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net.

I'm changing the text. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Iain.dalton (talk • contribs) 20:23, 22 February 2010 (UTC)


 * This copy of usesnet article posted Aug 8 11:02:50 1985 called "net.doggerel" shows that Ed Nather did compose stuff in the 80s, so it may be that it was originally posted in "free verse". There is a Usenet version from Nov 20 1984, 9:32 am by Matt Crawford repost of Source: usenet: utastro!nather, May 21, 1983 which was already formatted as "free verse". -- PBS (talk) 05:44, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

What is the evidence that the free verse was intentional? My reading of the source material is that the formatting just kind of happened as it bounced around. Saying the "...story was modified by someone..." indicated human agency, for which there is no evidence that i've seen. I know this discussion is five years old, but unless an editor can point to some evidence that the free verse version was intentional, we should change the language in the article. I'll give it a couple of days. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 20:30, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Dates
There is a potential problem with the dates. If "The realest programmer of all" was published in the usenet group net.jokes on May 21, 1983, then it could not have been in response to the Datamation article "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" as that did not come out until July 1983. So the line at the start of the piece "A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in Fortran." must either be referring to the piece published somewhere else before it as published in Datamation or the line must refer to a different article. -- PBS (talk) 05:57, 17 August 2011 (UTC)