10 ms·

Burn the Programmer

377 points by thenomad 9y ago

jtmarmon 9y ago
interesting premise in the article but masked by horrible writing. i had to reread this multiple times to understand the point of it. the transition from talking about VR to programming was incredibly vague.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  I disagree. I thought it was very clear and concise.
- stefantheard 9y ago
  I also disagree. Clear, interesting, and entertaining. I even smiled at a couple parts.
marsrover 9y ago
You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.
- jvagner 9y ago
  have you met any designers?
- yetihehe 9y ago
  It depends on what those "wizards" do. If it's just making some formula in spreadsheet work, it's not too awesome. If it's stopping time[1], that might be more "magical". [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/11/09/stop-motion-with-the-time-glove/ https://hackaday.com/2017/11/09/stop-motion-with-the-time-gl...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    > If it's just making some formula in spreadsheet work Excel functionality is on part with some programming languages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
  - arethuza 9y ago
    "it's not too awesome" Maybe if you had seen some of the eldritch devious monstrosities I've seen people create in Excel (even without VBA) you might reconsider that statement. Be very worried if someone says "we have this Excel spreadsheet that needs to be turned into an app"....
    - yetihehe 9y ago
      =A1+B1 is not awesome for normal people. If you want, you can do magic with anything, but it was only an example.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      I have also seen a company (tech) who used an excel spreadsheet as part f its accounts system turns out it was faulty and was a factor to the company going bust - the main one was ICANT tho
    - cirgue 9y ago
      If programming is wizardry, things written in Excel are definitely necromancy: the end result is shambling, hideous, and unnatural, but for certain things it gets the job done.
- CM30 9y ago
  Probably depends on what field they're in and how much 'further ahead' they seem compared to everyone else. I suspect some people think of people/teams who are really good at programming video games as 'magicians'. And when they're so good at programming that they outshine pretty much the entire rest of their 'industry' or 'niche', then I can definitely see people treating them like magicians. There were certainly people who saw the developer of the SMW hack Brutal Mario as one, thanks to the huge amounts of custom code present for the new enemies/bosses/blocks/level gimmicks/whatever else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa41RSwiCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa41RSwiCc But eh, I suspect a good programmer in most fields wouldn't be seen as 'magical'.
- everyone 9y ago
  I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or metalworker. We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop completely novel things or masterworks. Sometimes many of us will be commissioned together to build something really big or challenging.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    I think the craft aspect is somewhat romanticized and that much of programming work is more like a kind of accounting or some other clerical bureaucratic trade.
    - everyone 9y ago
      Maybe you've been at it longer than me.. and as one gets more experienced/jaded ones analogies become less romantic.. Wizard!, tradesman, garbageman, bureaucrat... I hope it doesnt get down to politician!! Also software is a huge field and where u work in it probably has an effect. I never do internety stuff for example, I make computer games.
      - mbrock 9y ago
        I'm actually kind of romantically impressed by accountants and actuaries!
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        > I hope it doesnt get down to politician!! Given how political certain projects have become, i dunno...
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      In my experience, that depends entirely on your role. I've found that my place is within a team of 5<x<20 - it's large enough that I can work on "meta" stuff like workflow improvements and refactoring existing functionality to make it generically applicable where appropriate, but small enough that my contributions are not lost in the noise and I can see the impact I'm having on the team's overall velocity. If all I were doing every day was implementing yet another CRUD form, then I would feel the same way you've described.
- ben_w 9y ago
  My experience has been that what we consider easy or impressive has very little in common with what others find trivial or impressive. For example, soon after I got my degree I was making browser based games, and the artist I was working with was really impressed with the particle effect fireworks I’d added to the highscores table out of boredom and was expecting to be told to remove. And, on the other hand, a real time perlin noise warp tunnel I added to a later game was described as an embarrassing glitch that the boss thought looked like a bug rather than a deliberate effect. (And, unlike the fireworks, had actually been a requested feature).
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    I remember a project when I was a bit younger and naive, where we had a 3d view of the world, and my job was to implement the display of the sky. So I went off and dug into the research and literature and ended up with a nice efficient C++/OpenGL implementation of [1], including sunrise and sunset effects and haze. Also added night with a realistic ephemeris containing the moon in the correct position and phase and the top 500 or so brightest stars. The feedback was all negative. The boss and the designers basically said, "Just make it blue." A couple episodes like that help make you sufficiently jaded and cynical, but also teach you pay attention to the requirements and not to go overboard. 1: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/papers/sunsky/sunsky.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/papers/sunsky/sunsky.pdf
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Hah! Now you’ve reminded me how they hated my Ken Burns effect but loved the accidental posterisation from the (RLE) image compressor that was only there because of a severe download size limit and (something something possibly NDA so self-censoring just in case).
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Unlike chemical engineers, programmers have the ability to give specific instructions that machines obey. We put things in motion.
- pidg 9y ago
  I think the point is any profession that can wield unusual control over other things (or people) can be described in this way. That would include people like psychologists, hypnotists, marketers, politicians etc. Once you know all the tricks it stops being magical, but it takes a lot of time and effort to know all the tricks.
- adekok 9y ago
  > I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? There is a large difference between competence and ignorance. They're qualitatively different, and different in each field. e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much) The same applies for mechanics, carpenters, etc. I've seen good people work, and they do things that I just don't get. I'm not sure any amount of training will result in the same intuitive understanding. It's why I went into programming, and not anything else...
  - megaman22 9y ago
    > e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much) More than once it has crossed my mind that it would be worthwhile to build custom error message dialogs that can't be closed for at least 30 seconds (maybe with a secret override) for some areas of our products. The number of times I've been on a support screenshare with customers where they try to connect to some external service, and it fails, and they instantly dismiss the prompt that would tell them exactly why it failed, if they would just read it, is maddening. At least that kind of a built-in delay would give me time to fire up the snipping tool and grab a screenshot from my end...
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Why not just write to an error log? You could even have some button to send it to you or something.
      - megaman22 9y ago
        Oh, we do that too... It's a struggle to get people to actually send those to us, for some reason, or even just open them up. Usually this kind of thing occurs with initial installation, and we're typically installing into some location that is firewalled to hell and gone, so we can't depend on being able to access anything even within their own LAN, let alone the outside internet. Enterprise Windows software is so much fun.
- iRideUnicornz 9y ago
  I think the reason for this level of abstraction isn't just due to the difficulty in understanding what we do, but rather the _intangibility_ of what we do. When we talk about magic, we describe a system that is intangible to the uncultured. While everyone is capable of seeing the result, the non-magically adept are incapable of seeing the 'systems' that magic is based on (ie the "flow of mana" or the "rewriting of logic"). The same can be said about programming. Everyone is able to use the products and results we put out, but to understand the "process" is something else entirely. When an engineer makes something, they are making a _physical_ object by essentially designing and putting _physical_ parts together. Obviously, there's a LOT of math, simulations and design principles that they do as well, but the layman doesn't need to know that - they just see someone who creates parts to build bigger things. A doctor uses his tools and knowledge to _physically_ manipulate the body and fixes physical problems in the body. No layman will ever perform a heart transplant, but they can understand the concept of taking another heart, moving it and connecting the blood vessels and nerve. What does a programmer do? We put together a line of text that somehow represent electricity that is somehow filtered through microscopic parts, resulting in a machine capable of emulating human speech? What? And now we're getting into quantum computing and cryptocurrency - things that require a massive wealth of knowledge across many fields to fully grasp, and also neural networks and machine learning - things that programmers understand the intended behavior of, but is impossible to perfectly understand their oftentimes random-seeming behavior. It's not a stretch to say that we're reaching a point in time where technology has essentially become like magic.
- mikegerwitz 9y ago
  > I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though. This doesn't address your first paragraph, but I wanted to comment on this. I identify as a hacker. The terms "wizard", "incantation", etc are fairly ingrained in our culture. But if I do something and someone refers to it as "magic", it actually makes me uncomfortable; it means that they don't understand what I did or how I did it, and rather than trying to understand it, they dismiss it as something magical. This might sometimes be because they have better things to do at that moment than consider what I did---which is fine. But comparing it as magic still rubs me the wrong way. I don't do magic: everything I do is explainable, and I can explain it to you if you ask. I used to practice magic when I was much younger---I was an illusionist for a couple years. I was pretty good at it. I did street magic, mentalism, and various other things that seemed impossible or even supernatural/metaphysical. Magic. I still do some tricks I remember for my kids. But whenever they think that it's real---whenever _anyone_ thinks that it might be real---I make sure that they understand that it is an illusion. A trick. A hack, if you will. With my kids, I show them how it's done. And they still love it. The article shows a regular expression and calls it a "magical incantation". It looks opaque, but it can be understood. The language can be learned. You can format it in a sane manner and dissect it. (Displaying a regex that complicated on one line is a disservice to others, with the intent of making it look opaque. It's like removing all whitespace and newlines from your code or writing complicated one-liners and saying "look, it's magic".) It isn't a magical incantation.
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    > if I do something and someone refers to it as "magic", it actually makes me uncomfortable; it means that they don't understand what I did or how I did it It occurs to me that the first steps I take in most new-to-me established projects are basically magic - I'm looking for specific shell commands that the other dev(s) use to perform certain actions: build, run, test, deploy, etc. What's more, there are often undocumented environment dependencies - env vars that need to be set, certain executables that must be installed on the dev's system and in the path, etc. > It looks opaque, but it can be understood. I don't think "magic" in this sense means "cannot be understood" - only that it's incomprehensible at some point, and it's performed without understanding to achieve the desired result.
- psyc 9y ago
  Every normal person I know in real life thinks my code is wizardry. In fact the only people I ever, ever catch trying to pass off programming as just another profession, are programmers. I wrote code for 8 years before encountering another programmer. During that time, I could barely believe that more than a handful of people in the world could possibly be navigating this rabbit hole effectively. It’s too complex and abstract - how would two people even communicate about it? Turns out I was wrong about the first part, but a little too right about the second part. Even mathematicians find more agreement about what is true than programmers do.
- ocschwar 9y ago
  > I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. For a layman who's curious about computers, he can just go to a computer and try stuff. Worst outcome from there is loss of some data. If you're curious about chemical engineering, you're restrained a bit, because you're not really going to go near equipment that can easily blow you up, burn you, freeze you, or poison you. So without the tantalizing hints that IT drops near you all the time, you're not going to wonder whether chemical engineers are wizards.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    > Worst outcome from there is loss of some data. From personal experience, that is more than scary enough for some to never attempt anything at all.
throwanem 9y ago
Getting hit pretty hard. To very briefly summarize, the article reviews an occasional trope in writing about our field, namely that it has some interesting correspondences with old-style conceptions of magic - from hermitical study of certain esoterica granting access to powers and principalities beyond the ordinary ken, through potentially hostile reaction to same among those lacking such secret knowledge and frightened by the prospect of a world increasingly founded on it, to "do not call up what you cannot put down" in the context of modern AI and ML research and the applications thereof.
- cstross 9y ago
  My server (where this guest article is hosted) is fielding some 20 HTTP GET requests/second and is holding up fine (load avg. is still under 1.0). I'm guessing there may be some routing problems — antipope.org is hosted in the UK.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    It did seem a little atypical to see your blog struggling under HN traffic. Now I guess I know why!
gallerdude 9y ago
When I was a preteen, I'd watch Notch's ld48 programming streams, and I'd just be confused. I had read the basics of if-statements, for-loops, and functions, but he was using them in a way beyond my comprehension. Later I discovered MIT's Scratch, and it let me figure things out on my own: games, physics, genetic algorithms. I think programming is portrayed to be more difficult than it is. It's a mixture between programmers trying to find the most efficient system, and the public's half-uncertainty of computers being magnified.
- mrguyorama 9y ago
  I think 90% of the difficulty of learning to program is building and interpreting your mental models of how everything works. This is unfortunate, because everyone's mental models are different, and it's the same problem we see in math teaching, where things are extremely difficult until it "clicks" and suddenly it's so easy
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    It is why everyone has to write their own version of a monad tutorial. :)
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Wait, you can do genetic algorithms in Scratch?
  - dboreham 9y ago
    Infinite tape; party on...
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/30924542/ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/30924542/
    - gallerdude 9y ago
      I'm not sure if that was intentional, but yeah that's mine!
stryan 9y ago
Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in looking a bit more into "programming as magic" there's a great book series called The Wizardry series about programmers being transported into a fantasy realm where magic works similarly to a programming language. The main character ends up writing a compiler based off (IIRC) APL and revolutionizes magic. The first book is called Wizard's Bane and it's light and fun reading.
- NikolaeVarius 9y ago
  The books Daemon/Freedom by Daniel Suarez was pretty entertaining on that front. The idea that people could literally affect the world around them via "magic spells" which mapped aliases of a invented language that would be picked up by microphones and then executed on computers. There is a section that muses about the future of humanity and how in the near future, these would literally seem like magic to anyone who doens't have technical know how, and for all intents and purposes, it was.
  - shostack 9y ago
    With always listening assistants, we're practically there with Google and Alexa. We just need cooler things to interact with than communication and divination (checking the weather) "spells." As soon as we get some sort of grey goo with an API like in Big Hero 6 or wrist mounted fireball/lightning generators we're in business.
    - civilian 9y ago
      "hocus pocus fe fi fo fum, play Taylor Swift's latest album"
  - proaralyst 9y ago
    In the Quantum Thief (actually one of its sequels) by Hannu Rajaniemi, there are Secret Names that perform magic; one of them was 'Emergency Decompression Protection' and produced a shield around the incanter.
jszymborski 9y ago
I find it at the very least a little ironic that the author used consumer technology to simulate magic abilities (to such an immersive state that he had to put a low-horror mode) and uses his success in this department as an argument that consumer technology doesn't very closely convey the feeling of magic. I appreciate the argument being made, but I can't say that I accept the premise that (sufficiently advanced) consumer technology is often unlike magic. Hell, just sending out an invisible beam of light towards a magic black box so that it can remotely open up a window to a lands that may or may not exist is an awfully cool reality to hide behind the rather normal sounding acronym "TV", and that's hardly cutting edge technology.
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  There is something in the fact that consumer products often try to 'get out of the way'. So yes, the way it actually works is extremely magical, but it manages to hide it so well that people don't really think about it. The fact that the remote controls the TV is just a fact of life and the way the world works, while how to stop the radio from bleeping every night at midnight, that is magical.
- derefr 9y ago
  He was talking specifically about the feeling of doing magic, not the feeling of experiencing magic being done. He's interpreting "X feels like magic" as "X feels like being a wizard." Playing a VR game doesn't feel like being a wizard; it just feels like having a spell cast on you.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Looks like it's starting to buckle, mirror just in case: http://archive.is/Vx9u7 http://archive.is/Vx9u7
fermigier 9y ago
"...Ever tried to set up a Postfix server?" is the new "...Ever tried to set up a Sendmail server?". (When I was younger, I was told by a veteran sysadmin that only 5 persons in the world knew how to configure Sendmail directly, everyone else was relying on preprocessing scripts written by the aforementioned wizards). Edit: my point is that Postfix is actually quite easy to configure, compared to Sendmail which was the standard in the 90s.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  See also: argument-dependent lookup rules in C++
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Is it? I've only modified existing configurations, but Postfix doesn't seem bad.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    Postfix is quite simple, provided you already know how MTAs work and can google the right terms. Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      > Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation. Hah; I had to look at a sendmail config a while back for a legacy server. It's line noise.
- chungy 9y ago
  I've picked Postfix entirely because Exim is difficult and overkill for my purposes...
- thenomad 9y ago
  OP and writer of the article here. I'm embarassed to say that I wrote Postfix when I meant Sendmail! I might just go ninja-edit that now :)
- 9y ago
weeksie 9y ago
It's definitely an old metaphor. SICP is the "Wizard Book" after all, and IIRC they even used the term "incantations" to describe commands and programming constructs at some points, though it's been well over a decade since I've leafed through it.
- heptathorp 9y ago
  We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
j2kun 9y ago
It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."
- hawleyal 9y ago
  MLIA
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  The senior staff at Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series are a lot like this.
  - crooked-v 9y ago
    Well, it depends on if you're talking early series or late series. Early series, the wizards were college academia taken to absurdist violent extremes, to the point of assassinating each other to try and get tenure slots. Most of that got quietly dropped over time to make them more likeable.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      ...that's an option? (Ex-academic here.)
      - jon_richards 9y ago
        Trust me, you don't want to go down that path. Spend all that time memorizing some complicated spell, use it once, and poof, you've completely forgotten it.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  Most of the Discworld magic, really. Moreso the witches than the wizards, the wizards are more concerned with the next meal.
b0rsuk 9y ago
Another analogy that I can't shake off is True Name and search engines. Since the dawn of time folk tales placed emphasis on true name of people and objects. Knowing the true name grants one power over something or someone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name Knowing the true name of someone lets you put it in a search engine and find out about him/her. There are some sleazy smartphone apps which let you do even more. Knowing the name of the problem lets you search for the algorithm. Certain problems become trivial if you can name them and find an already known solution.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Even better, sometimes I wonder if history is not going in circles. Maybe so much fuss is made about True Names because it's echoes of a long dead civilization which already had computers and search engines ? Atlantis ? Quetzalcoatl ? Meroe ? Hyperborea ? Mu ? Lyonesse ? Dogons ?
  - splouk 9y ago
    Would we not find archaeological evidence of these technologies? Plastic tends to stick around for a long time.
    - b0rsuk 9y ago
      I was only half-serious about it. My hobbies include SF and fantasy. It's an intriguing idea for a setting.
  - fao_ 9y ago
    You don't have to have computers to have amazing record keeping combined with shitty security. Egypt under the rule of the Romans was run with a ridiculously tight ship because they wanted to extract tax revenue from every single person in the country. Same with China around the same period.
- wruza 9y ago
  As true names are unique (are they?), they seem more like debug console credentials, where you can ultimately control or threat the existence of named being.
sizzzzlerz 9y ago
Somebody is getting fired.
sizzzzlerz 9y ago
Chapter MXCVIII in the 2027 an MBA program textbook: Corporate Public Relations: What Not To Do.
flip2017 9y ago
True mages don't get burned - they create magocratic tyrannies. Read some contemporary fantasy.
hitekker 9y ago
From what I've heard, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" seems unsupported by available historical evidence: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32371/38995 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32371/38995 >Among others. I searched and read a lot, looking for anything along the lines of "the long-isolated tribesmen were amazed at seeing a cell phone for the first time, and asked 'what kind of magic is this?'" But I have not found anything that relates a story of confusing technology with magic. >The additional point about the tendency of visitors to THINK they've been perceived as superior divinities is extremely valuable.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wonderbear 9y ago
Most of us would just be full of ourselves to call ourselves magicians or imagine that anyone else sees us that way. But there are people working towards creating things that no one will be able to control once they're out.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  That horse has bolted
iRideUnicornz 9y ago
This is a really well-written article. It's clear, concise and sticks to the point, not drowning the reader in anecdotes and unrelated analogies. I've thought these same thoughts myself when explaining automation and how it would affect their lives to my parents, and was met with mostly indifference not because they were stubborn but because they simply couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that a computer (which, when they were growing up as teens, weren't even capable of doing things like e-mails) could ever fully replace them, people who studied for years to master and certify their respective jobs. This article describes that experience in a truly creative and interesting way.
coldcode 9y ago
I've never seen wizards in fantasy novels have to deal with myriads of JIRA tickets, attend interminable mind-numbing meetings and solve impossible dependency hells. I guess that's why they call it fantasy.
- bachaco 9y ago
  We have found the grumpy wizard
- tech2 9y ago
  Allow me to introduce you to the wizards of the Unseen University...
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  Bob Howard in the Laundry series by Charles Stross is a wizard who has started out in IT and who does have to go to interminable powerpoint meetings and work through lots of hideous beaurocracy.
juj5 9y ago
Well the wizards at the Boeing factory make fucking things that fly man! And those flying things have even been used to drop nukes. Who is burning them at the stake?
kardianos 9y ago
And this is why I program in Go. Hardware OS Program (no libc, no dynamic libs, no external runtime) Go specializes in "it runs like you read it". I hate magic in my program and I distrust programmers who program like a magician.
- cname 9y ago
  Go is still a pile of abstractions built on top of another pile of abstractions that almost no one fully groks. It doesn't seem significantly less "magical" than any other commonly-used language, especially from the perspective of non-wizards, even if it might be a better tool for casting certain spells.
- computerex 9y ago
  I don't know if your "hardware OS program" is representative. Try writing a trivial web application using cutting edge technologies. You'll quickly see how much you have to know to work on even trivial applications.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
No. The only people that seem to get upset about this is the media, because their power is being usurped by Facebook, and Silicon Valley itself. Go 30 mins outside of the Bay Area and everyone thinks Silicon Valley is great, and programmers work magic. Living in this tech bubble gives a skewed view of the world, but really no one cares.
- derefr 9y ago
  Even the people whose jobs are being displaced by automation?
  - ben_w 9y ago
    I get the impression that right now they’re too busy blaming offshoring and immigrants to realise that their jobs have been automated and nobody is doing them.
    - Jach 9y ago
      Or figuring they'll just get another job, or their job will have them do something else instead of whatever it is that got automated.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Only wizards in some kind of coastal ego bubble More like "Burn the programmer! Adobe has crashed for the third time today!", or "Burn the programmer! YouTube has 100k+ likes on my copyrighted video (that someone else uploaded), and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!"
beefield 9y ago
relevant xkcd flowchart to wizardry: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/
SCHiM 9y ago
Haha yes, many have laid the link between magic and computers/programming. I remember as a child being very interested in magic and that fascination naturally refocussed to computers in my adult life. Also check out this website for a funny parable about computers, DNS, wizards and the NSA: http://grimoire.computer/ http://grimoire.computer/
computerwizard 9y ago
I think about this a lot. To control atoms and construct new systems using language and thoughtforms alone seems as close to magic as you can get.
jhanschoo 9y ago
The notion of a terribly powerful yet unintelligible wizard really isn't that novel a situation. Lawyers have long suffered that role, and among several communities (e.g. anti-vax, alternative med.), medical doctors too.
foxhop 9y ago
I wrote about this in 2011 - http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-alchemy/ http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-alchemy/ Programming is like Alchemy
draw_down 9y ago
To me, many forms of artistry like singing and dance are so much more magical than anything we do. We just type a bunch of shit into computers until they do stuff, poorly.
morgante 9y ago
This metaphor is really stretched thin and doesn't help much with explaining anti-tech sentiments. I really don't see why complicated wizardry is required for something to be magical. That seems to be an assumption coming from the author's genre. There are plenty of brands of magic which include extensive creation of magical artifacts which anyone can use (akin to consumer electronics). As for anti-tech sentiments, I don't think any complicated allegory to burning witches is required. It really just feels like the natural result of technologists gaining wealth—almost every high-earning profession has significant critics (cf. lawyers, investment bankers).
barce 9y ago
'But I can't help but feel, looking at a lot of the media pushback at the moment, that a lot of it is straight-up fantasy novel 101 "Reactions To Wizardry".' If the last US recession is any indication, the elite (in this case, the quants), can ruin a national economy and not get burned. I wish the author gave less vague examples to his claims.
thenomad 9y ago
If people enjoyed this post, you might be interested to hear that the author (me) is currently doing an AMA over on Reddit, too - https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hancock_i_founded_machinima_and_made/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hanco...
choonway 9y ago
There was a magical crystal that blessed the land with bountiful harvest every year, until civil war broke out in the country. Mysteriously the crystal shattered into a thousand pieces and parts of it fell all over the continent. Some parts were irrevocably lost. After the civil war was settled, and the country split in two, famine ravaged both sides. It is up to you, my courageous wizard, to recover the parts that still exists, and to rediscover how to recreate the parts that were destroyed, and reassemble the crystal into a whole again. Hostility from former enemies, unexpected allies, and dark conspiracy abounds. ... Yep, that totally describes my current gig with an MNC right now...
robto 9y ago
This puts me in mind of Aphyr's series on a powerful wizard interviewing in the valley: https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie... https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview I think there are wizards but I'm not one of them.
meheleventyone 9y ago
I’m suspicious of the idea people are afraid of wizards versus wising up to the fact that wizards aren’t as wise and just as society presumed they were. They’ve found out that wizards are just people with a particular skill set.
pdkl95 9y ago
From the first comment: > I don't think we're looking at a Butlerian Jihad any time soon I personally know many people that see something Butlerian Jihad-like as inevitable. Most say they would regret the loss of some technology, but the appeal of being free of complex wizardry trying to manipulate them in ways seem forever outside their understanding has increased a lot over the last few years. A small-ish subset of that group are actively trying to start a Buterian Jihad. Don't write off the possibility of blowback from the growing group of people that feel technology (and the people that make it) are "disrupting" their income wht remains of their agency over their own lives. There are many ways that could play out - most are not full revolts against technology - but predicting the future is hard. What I do know is that when you see pitchforks and torches... it's too late.
japhyr 9y ago
I teach high school math and science, and I fully recognize that most of my students will not end up in math and science-focused careers. So I think pretty carefully about my goals for these students. One clear purpose in everything I ask students to do: take away the sense of "magic" in technological things. I just finished teaching a math class, where the final project was a 3d modeling exercise. Students didn't always enjoy the process, but they were deeply satisfied with their work in the end. Most of them will never model anything again in their lives. But we've removed the idea that when they see an amazingly detailed 3d-printed prosthetic limb, that the designer was doing some kind of magic. They know that the designer worked from the same principles they learned, the only real difference is that the designer enjoyed this work enough to stay with it and become highly proficient at it. These are all students who will not want to burn programmers, but who will instead understand the hard work that goes into well-designed apps and products. They will also know that people who design crappy or harmful products can do much better and much different work.
- adamsea 9y ago
  This is a great point. I think it is tempting and understandable to, at times, appreciate the "magic" of our profession, but our goal should be able to take away that sense of magic - both in terms of creating programming languages and tools which are more intuitive for human beings, and, as OP says, in terms of education. There will always be some magic in programming. Unnecessary magic, imho, is just another form of obfuscation.
- jrs95 9y ago
  This is really cool. I had the good luck of having 2 really great math teachers in high school, and seemingly little things like this can really have a lasting impact. One of them taught me both computer science and statistics, and did an amazing job at both. He went way above and beyond the minimum required curriculum for AP CS, so I basically picked up everything I needed to know to get a job just in that class. And for stats, this guy did something I'd never actually seen a teacher do before. Over the course of one semester he'd managed to get the entire class of mostly average students to go from having a typical negative attitude towards math to being genuinely interested and capable of critical thinking that most adults I have met never do. The other teacher taught a variety of math classes, but I had him for pre-calculus. He was really passionate about what he was doing and that rubbed off on everyone. He did an excellent job of relating everything back to real world topics and really seemed to make things click with people in a way that was highly unusual from my perspective. The difference those two were able to make impressed me so much I almost decided to go into teaching, but I didn't have any means of paying for college. Fortunately I was able to get into software without a degree, in part because of the great work those two did.
jrs95 9y ago
So if programmers are wizards, who is our Voldemort that wants us to rule the world? ;)
- endgame 9y ago
  He who controls the book of faces.
  - thenomad 9y ago
    Goddamn, that really does sound sinister as hell.
abecedarius 9y ago
I think of magic as the fantasy of relating to the world around you in the same way as to your own subconscious. This has obvious appeal -- by System 2 standards, your System 1 is a super-powered genie -- and lots of story potential from the familiar difficulty and cross-purposes of that interface. But we need more of the Alan Kay-ish notion of augmenting your System 2 abilities instead (if I have his philosophy roughly right) -- 'magic' in the service of clear thinking instead of mysticism. Environments that invite you to dig into any part that puzzles or frustrates you, figure out the problem, change it. We shouldn't accept the black box so readily.
kbenson 9y ago
(Fun fact: horror games are more intense in VR, by some margin. So terrifying, in fact, that I added a "Low Terror Mode" recently, after reading a significant number of people saying "I'd love to play your game, but I absolutely won't, because it sounds way too scary.") While I would love to play the full terror mode, the low terror mode made me think of a game that replaced the undead horrors you summon with giant puppies that lick your foes until they lose all feelings of anger. A silly idea, to be sure, but it would be fun to play if the theme was expanded on just to see the insanity, and that's the stuff cult (in the media sense...) followings talk about decades later.
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  I think it's Skyrim that has a mod to replace the giant spiders with bears...
- thenomad 9y ago
  Hah! That's an interesting idea. I might just think about doing that for an April Fools' or similar...
AlexCoventry 9y ago
This reminds me of the hostility towards the Tinkers in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War.
throw2016 9y ago
This whole mystifying programming may be good for the ego but its not real. Anyone sufficiently interested can learn programming, and even work as a programmer without a degree and the 3-4 years of education and training other professions require. And programming is not particularly difficult, people learn for more than 16-20 years of their life. Those interested will pick it up. There is something seriously wrong in the tech community when many are quick and even eager to think of others as stupid. This is not only immature but its disconnected from reality. I think many should spend compulsory time with kids to understand how truly wonderful the human brain is.
- wavegeek 9y ago
  > many are quick and even eager to think of others as stupid There is no hard data I could find but I would guess* that the average programmer probably has a higher IQ than 100. So if we define "stupid" as "not as smart as oneself" then this belief is probably somewhat true. *Having worked with a lot of different kinds of programmers and having also worked with the general public.
kkotak 9y ago
If anyone's burning the programmers is the AI, Block chain programmers. Very soon, the industry will need/have a very small fraction of programmers than what we have today.
kemonocode 9y ago
I think it's less of an issue of programmers in general in danger of being seen as witches and more of a certain breed of programmer. You know the type. Not even the obviously "bad guys" and "hackers" induce that much of a visceral reaction. The sort of kid so detached from their community that yes, they might as well live in a haughty ivory tower with a handful of their peers and bring their arcane gizmos wherever they go and look down upon muggles in disdain. Those are I'm worried about giving the rest of us spellweavers a bad rap.
kral 9y ago
I won't call it magic, for me programming is like alchemy.
milliemily 9y ago
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377 points by thenomad 9y ago

interesting premise in the article but masked by horrible writing. i had to reread this multiple times to understand the point of it. the transition from talking about VR to programming was incredibly vague.

moron4hire 9y ago
I disagree. I thought it was very clear and concise.
stefantheard 9y ago
I also disagree. Clear, interesting, and entertaining. I even smiled at a couple parts.

marsrover 9y ago

You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.

jvagner 9y ago
have you met any designers?
yetihehe 9y ago
It depends on what those "wizards" do. If it's just making some formula in spreadsheet work, it's not too awesome. If it's stopping time[1], that might be more "magical". [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/11/09/stop-motion-with-the-time-glove/ https://hackaday.com/2017/11/09/stop-motion-with-the-time-gl...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  > If it's just making some formula in spreadsheet work Excel functionality is on part with some programming languages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- arethuza 9y ago
  "it's not too awesome" Maybe if you had seen some of the eldritch devious monstrosities I've seen people create in Excel (even without VBA) you might reconsider that statement. Be very worried if someone says "we have this Excel spreadsheet that needs to be turned into an app"....
  - yetihehe 9y ago
    =A1+B1 is not awesome for normal people. If you want, you can do magic with anything, but it was only an example.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    I have also seen a company (tech) who used an excel spreadsheet as part f its accounts system turns out it was faulty and was a factor to the company going bust - the main one was ICANT tho
  - cirgue 9y ago
    If programming is wizardry, things written in Excel are definitely necromancy: the end result is shambling, hideous, and unnatural, but for certain things it gets the job done.
CM30 9y ago
Probably depends on what field they're in and how much 'further ahead' they seem compared to everyone else. I suspect some people think of people/teams who are really good at programming video games as 'magicians'. And when they're so good at programming that they outshine pretty much the entire rest of their 'industry' or 'niche', then I can definitely see people treating them like magicians. There were certainly people who saw the developer of the SMW hack Brutal Mario as one, thanks to the huge amounts of custom code present for the new enemies/bosses/blocks/level gimmicks/whatever else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa41RSwiCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa41RSwiCc But eh, I suspect a good programmer in most fields wouldn't be seen as 'magical'.
everyone 9y ago
I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or metalworker. We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop completely novel things or masterworks. Sometimes many of us will be commissioned together to build something really big or challenging.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I think the craft aspect is somewhat romanticized and that much of programming work is more like a kind of accounting or some other clerical bureaucratic trade.
  - everyone 9y ago
    Maybe you've been at it longer than me.. and as one gets more experienced/jaded ones analogies become less romantic.. Wizard!, tradesman, garbageman, bureaucrat... I hope it doesnt get down to politician!! Also software is a huge field and where u work in it probably has an effect. I never do internety stuff for example, I make computer games.
    - mbrock 9y ago
      I'm actually kind of romantically impressed by accountants and actuaries!
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      > I hope it doesnt get down to politician!! Given how political certain projects have become, i dunno...
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    In my experience, that depends entirely on your role. I've found that my place is within a team of 5<x<20 - it's large enough that I can work on "meta" stuff like workflow improvements and refactoring existing functionality to make it generically applicable where appropriate, but small enough that my contributions are not lost in the noise and I can see the impact I'm having on the team's overall velocity. If all I were doing every day was implementing yet another CRUD form, then I would feel the same way you've described.
ben_w 9y ago
My experience has been that what we consider easy or impressive has very little in common with what others find trivial or impressive. For example, soon after I got my degree I was making browser based games, and the artist I was working with was really impressed with the particle effect fireworks I’d added to the highscores table out of boredom and was expecting to be told to remove. And, on the other hand, a real time perlin noise warp tunnel I added to a later game was described as an embarrassing glitch that the boss thought looked like a bug rather than a deliberate effect. (And, unlike the fireworks, had actually been a requested feature).
- ryandrake 9y ago
  I remember a project when I was a bit younger and naive, where we had a 3d view of the world, and my job was to implement the display of the sky. So I went off and dug into the research and literature and ended up with a nice efficient C++/OpenGL implementation of [1], including sunrise and sunset effects and haze. Also added night with a realistic ephemeris containing the moon in the correct position and phase and the top 500 or so brightest stars. The feedback was all negative. The boss and the designers basically said, "Just make it blue." A couple episodes like that help make you sufficiently jaded and cynical, but also teach you pay attention to the requirements and not to go overboard. 1: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/papers/sunsky/sunsky.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/papers/sunsky/sunsky.pdf
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Hah! Now you’ve reminded me how they hated my Ken Burns effect but loved the accidental posterisation from the (RLE) image compressor that was only there because of a severe download size limit and (something something possibly NDA so self-censoring just in case).
b0rsuk 9y ago
Unlike chemical engineers, programmers have the ability to give specific instructions that machines obey. We put things in motion.
pidg 9y ago
I think the point is any profession that can wield unusual control over other things (or people) can be described in this way. That would include people like psychologists, hypnotists, marketers, politicians etc. Once you know all the tricks it stops being magical, but it takes a lot of time and effort to know all the tricks.
adekok 9y ago
> I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? There is a large difference between competence and ignorance. They're qualitatively different, and different in each field. e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much) The same applies for mechanics, carpenters, etc. I've seen good people work, and they do things that I just don't get. I'm not sure any amount of training will result in the same intuitive understanding. It's why I went into programming, and not anything else...
- megaman22 9y ago
  > e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much) More than once it has crossed my mind that it would be worthwhile to build custom error message dialogs that can't be closed for at least 30 seconds (maybe with a secret override) for some areas of our products. The number of times I've been on a support screenshare with customers where they try to connect to some external service, and it fails, and they instantly dismiss the prompt that would tell them exactly why it failed, if they would just read it, is maddening. At least that kind of a built-in delay would give me time to fire up the snipping tool and grab a screenshot from my end...
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Why not just write to an error log? You could even have some button to send it to you or something.
    - megaman22 9y ago
      Oh, we do that too... It's a struggle to get people to actually send those to us, for some reason, or even just open them up. Usually this kind of thing occurs with initial installation, and we're typically installing into some location that is firewalled to hell and gone, so we can't depend on being able to access anything even within their own LAN, let alone the outside internet. Enterprise Windows software is so much fun.
iRideUnicornz 9y ago
I think the reason for this level of abstraction isn't just due to the difficulty in understanding what we do, but rather the _intangibility_ of what we do. When we talk about magic, we describe a system that is intangible to the uncultured. While everyone is capable of seeing the result, the non-magically adept are incapable of seeing the 'systems' that magic is based on (ie the "flow of mana" or the "rewriting of logic"). The same can be said about programming. Everyone is able to use the products and results we put out, but to understand the "process" is something else entirely. When an engineer makes something, they are making a _physical_ object by essentially designing and putting _physical_ parts together. Obviously, there's a LOT of math, simulations and design principles that they do as well, but the layman doesn't need to know that - they just see someone who creates parts to build bigger things. A doctor uses his tools and knowledge to _physically_ manipulate the body and fixes physical problems in the body. No layman will ever perform a heart transplant, but they can understand the concept of taking another heart, moving it and connecting the blood vessels and nerve. What does a programmer do? We put together a line of text that somehow represent electricity that is somehow filtered through microscopic parts, resulting in a machine capable of emulating human speech? What? And now we're getting into quantum computing and cryptocurrency - things that require a massive wealth of knowledge across many fields to fully grasp, and also neural networks and machine learning - things that programmers understand the intended behavior of, but is impossible to perfectly understand their oftentimes random-seeming behavior. It's not a stretch to say that we're reaching a point in time where technology has essentially become like magic.
mikegerwitz 9y ago
> I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though. This doesn't address your first paragraph, but I wanted to comment on this. I identify as a hacker. The terms "wizard", "incantation", etc are fairly ingrained in our culture. But if I do something and someone refers to it as "magic", it actually makes me uncomfortable; it means that they don't understand what I did or how I did it, and rather than trying to understand it, they dismiss it as something magical. This might sometimes be because they have better things to do at that moment than consider what I did---which is fine. But comparing it as magic still rubs me the wrong way. I don't do magic: everything I do is explainable, and I can explain it to you if you ask. I used to practice magic when I was much younger---I was an illusionist for a couple years. I was pretty good at it. I did street magic, mentalism, and various other things that seemed impossible or even supernatural/metaphysical. Magic. I still do some tricks I remember for my kids. But whenever they think that it's real---whenever _anyone_ thinks that it might be real---I make sure that they understand that it is an illusion. A trick. A hack, if you will. With my kids, I show them how it's done. And they still love it. The article shows a regular expression and calls it a "magical incantation". It looks opaque, but it can be understood. The language can be learned. You can format it in a sane manner and dissect it. (Displaying a regex that complicated on one line is a disservice to others, with the intent of making it look opaque. It's like removing all whitespace and newlines from your code or writing complicated one-liners and saying "look, it's magic".) It isn't a magical incantation.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  > if I do something and someone refers to it as "magic", it actually makes me uncomfortable; it means that they don't understand what I did or how I did it It occurs to me that the first steps I take in most new-to-me established projects are basically magic - I'm looking for specific shell commands that the other dev(s) use to perform certain actions: build, run, test, deploy, etc. What's more, there are often undocumented environment dependencies - env vars that need to be set, certain executables that must be installed on the dev's system and in the path, etc. > It looks opaque, but it can be understood. I don't think "magic" in this sense means "cannot be understood" - only that it's incomprehensible at some point, and it's performed without understanding to achieve the desired result.
psyc 9y ago
Every normal person I know in real life thinks my code is wizardry. In fact the only people I ever, ever catch trying to pass off programming as just another profession, are programmers. I wrote code for 8 years before encountering another programmer. During that time, I could barely believe that more than a handful of people in the world could possibly be navigating this rabbit hole effectively. It’s too complex and abstract - how would two people even communicate about it? Turns out I was wrong about the first part, but a little too right about the second part. Even mathematicians find more agreement about what is true than programmers do.
ocschwar 9y ago
> I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. For a layman who's curious about computers, he can just go to a computer and try stuff. Worst outcome from there is loss of some data. If you're curious about chemical engineering, you're restrained a bit, because you're not really going to go near equipment that can easily blow you up, burn you, freeze you, or poison you. So without the tantalizing hints that IT drops near you all the time, you're not going to wonder whether chemical engineers are wizards.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  > Worst outcome from there is loss of some data. From personal experience, that is more than scary enough for some to never attempt anything at all.

throwanem 9y ago

Getting hit pretty hard. To very briefly summarize, the article reviews an occasional trope in writing about our field, namely that it has some interesting correspondences with old-style conceptions of magic - from hermitical study of certain esoterica granting access to powers and principalities beyond the ordinary ken, through potentially hostile reaction to same among those lacking such secret knowledge and frightened by the prospect of a world increasingly founded on it, to "do not call up what you cannot put down" in the context of modern AI and ML research and the applications thereof.

cstross 9y ago
My server (where this guest article is hosted) is fielding some 20 HTTP GET requests/second and is holding up fine (load avg. is still under 1.0). I'm guessing there may be some routing problems — antipope.org is hosted in the UK.
- throwanem 9y ago
  It did seem a little atypical to see your blog struggling under HN traffic. Now I guess I know why!

gallerdude 9y ago

When I was a preteen, I'd watch Notch's ld48 programming streams, and I'd just be confused. I had read the basics of if-statements, for-loops, and functions, but he was using them in a way beyond my comprehension. Later I discovered MIT's Scratch, and it let me figure things out on my own: games, physics, genetic algorithms. I think programming is portrayed to be more difficult than it is. It's a mixture between programmers trying to find the most efficient system, and the public's half-uncertainty of computers being magnified.

mrguyorama 9y ago
I think 90% of the difficulty of learning to program is building and interpreting your mental models of how everything works. This is unfortunate, because everyone's mental models are different, and it's the same problem we see in math teaching, where things are extremely difficult until it "clicks" and suddenly it's so easy
- pjmlp 9y ago
  It is why everyone has to write their own version of a monad tutorial. :)
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Wait, you can do genetic algorithms in Scratch?
- dboreham 9y ago
  Infinite tape; party on...
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/30924542/ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/30924542/
  - gallerdude 9y ago
    I'm not sure if that was intentional, but yeah that's mine!

stryan 9y ago

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in looking a bit more into "programming as magic" there's a great book series called The Wizardry series about programmers being transported into a fantasy realm where magic works similarly to a programming language. The main character ends up writing a compiler based off (IIRC) APL and revolutionizes magic. The first book is called Wizard's Bane and it's light and fun reading.

NikolaeVarius 9y ago
The books Daemon/Freedom by Daniel Suarez was pretty entertaining on that front. The idea that people could literally affect the world around them via "magic spells" which mapped aliases of a invented language that would be picked up by microphones and then executed on computers. There is a section that muses about the future of humanity and how in the near future, these would literally seem like magic to anyone who doens't have technical know how, and for all intents and purposes, it was.
- shostack 9y ago
  With always listening assistants, we're practically there with Google and Alexa. We just need cooler things to interact with than communication and divination (checking the weather) "spells." As soon as we get some sort of grey goo with an API like in Big Hero 6 or wrist mounted fireball/lightning generators we're in business.
  - civilian 9y ago
    "hocus pocus fe fi fo fum, play Taylor Swift's latest album"
- proaralyst 9y ago
  In the Quantum Thief (actually one of its sequels) by Hannu Rajaniemi, there are Secret Names that perform magic; one of them was 'Emergency Decompression Protection' and produced a shield around the incanter.

jszymborski 9y ago

I find it at the very least a little ironic that the author used consumer technology to simulate magic abilities (to such an immersive state that he had to put a low-horror mode) and uses his success in this department as an argument that consumer technology doesn't very closely convey the feeling of magic. I appreciate the argument being made, but I can't say that I accept the premise that (sufficiently advanced) consumer technology is often unlike magic. Hell, just sending out an invisible beam of light towards a magic black box so that it can remotely open up a window to a lands that may or may not exist is an awfully cool reality to hide behind the rather normal sounding acronym "TV", and that's hardly cutting edge technology.

kybernetikos 9y ago
There is something in the fact that consumer products often try to 'get out of the way'. So yes, the way it actually works is extremely magical, but it manages to hide it so well that people don't really think about it. The fact that the remote controls the TV is just a fact of life and the way the world works, while how to stop the radio from bleeping every night at midnight, that is magical.
derefr 9y ago
He was talking specifically about the feeling of doing magic, not the feeling of experiencing magic being done. He's interpreting "X feels like magic" as "X feels like being a wizard." Playing a VR game doesn't feel like being a wizard; it just feels like having a spell cast on you.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Looks like it's starting to buckle, mirror just in case: http://archive.is/Vx9u7 http://archive.is/Vx9u7

fermigier 9y ago

"...Ever tried to set up a Postfix server?" is the new "...Ever tried to set up a Sendmail server?". (When I was younger, I was told by a veteran sysadmin that only 5 persons in the world knew how to configure Sendmail directly, everyone else was relying on preprocessing scripts written by the aforementioned wizards). Edit: my point is that Postfix is actually quite easy to configure, compared to Sendmail which was the standard in the 90s.

humanrebar 9y ago
See also: argument-dependent lookup rules in C++
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Is it? I've only modified existing configurations, but Postfix doesn't seem bad.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Postfix is quite simple, provided you already know how MTAs work and can google the right terms. Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    > Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation. Hah; I had to look at a sendmail config a while back for a legacy server. It's line noise.
chungy 9y ago
I've picked Postfix entirely because Exim is difficult and overkill for my purposes...
thenomad 9y ago
OP and writer of the article here. I'm embarassed to say that I wrote Postfix when I meant Sendmail! I might just go ninja-edit that now :)
9y ago

weeksie 9y ago

It's definitely an old metaphor. SICP is the "Wizard Book" after all, and IIRC they even used the term "incantations" to describe commands and programming constructs at some points, though it's been well over a decade since I've leafed through it.

heptathorp 9y ago
We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

j2kun 9y ago

It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."

hawleyal 9y ago
MLIA
AndrewDucker 9y ago
The senior staff at Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series are a lot like this.
- crooked-v 9y ago
  Well, it depends on if you're talking early series or late series. Early series, the wizards were college academia taken to absurdist violent extremes, to the point of assassinating each other to try and get tenure slots. Most of that got quietly dropped over time to make them more likeable.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    ...that's an option? (Ex-academic here.)
    - jon_richards 9y ago
      Trust me, you don't want to go down that path. Spend all that time memorizing some complicated spell, use it once, and poof, you've completely forgotten it.
SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
Most of the Discworld magic, really. Moreso the witches than the wizards, the wizards are more concerned with the next meal.

b0rsuk 9y ago

Another analogy that I can't shake off is True Name and search engines. Since the dawn of time folk tales placed emphasis on true name of people and objects. Knowing the true name grants one power over something or someone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name Knowing the true name of someone lets you put it in a search engine and find out about him/her. There are some sleazy smartphone apps which let you do even more. Knowing the name of the problem lets you search for the algorithm. Certain problems become trivial if you can name them and find an already known solution.

b0rsuk 9y ago
Even better, sometimes I wonder if history is not going in circles. Maybe so much fuss is made about True Names because it's echoes of a long dead civilization which already had computers and search engines ? Atlantis ? Quetzalcoatl ? Meroe ? Hyperborea ? Mu ? Lyonesse ? Dogons ?
- splouk 9y ago
  Would we not find archaeological evidence of these technologies? Plastic tends to stick around for a long time.
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    I was only half-serious about it. My hobbies include SF and fantasy. It's an intriguing idea for a setting.
- fao_ 9y ago
  You don't have to have computers to have amazing record keeping combined with shitty security. Egypt under the rule of the Romans was run with a ridiculously tight ship because they wanted to extract tax revenue from every single person in the country. Same with China around the same period.
wruza 9y ago
As true names are unique (are they?), they seem more like debug console credentials, where you can ultimately control or threat the existence of named being.

sizzzzlerz 9y ago

Somebody is getting fired.

sizzzzlerz 9y ago

Chapter MXCVIII in the 2027 an MBA program textbook: Corporate Public Relations: What Not To Do.

flip2017 9y ago

True mages don't get burned - they create magocratic tyrannies. Read some contemporary fantasy.

hitekker 9y ago

From what I've heard, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" seems unsupported by available historical evidence: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32371/38995 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32371/38995 >Among others. I searched and read a lot, looking for anything along the lines of "the long-isolated tribesmen were amazed at seeing a cell phone for the first time, and asked 'what kind of magic is this?'" But I have not found anything that relates a story of confusing technology with magic. >The additional point about the tendency of visitors to THINK they've been perceived as superior divinities is extremely valuable.

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wonderbear 9y ago

Most of us would just be full of ourselves to call ourselves magicians or imagine that anyone else sees us that way. But there are people working towards creating things that no one will be able to control once they're out.

quickthrower2 9y ago
That horse has bolted

iRideUnicornz 9y ago

This is a really well-written article. It's clear, concise and sticks to the point, not drowning the reader in anecdotes and unrelated analogies. I've thought these same thoughts myself when explaining automation and how it would affect their lives to my parents, and was met with mostly indifference not because they were stubborn but because they simply couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that a computer (which, when they were growing up as teens, weren't even capable of doing things like e-mails) could ever fully replace them, people who studied for years to master and certify their respective jobs. This article describes that experience in a truly creative and interesting way.

coldcode 9y ago

I've never seen wizards in fantasy novels have to deal with myriads of JIRA tickets, attend interminable mind-numbing meetings and solve impossible dependency hells. I guess that's why they call it fantasy.

bachaco 9y ago
We have found the grumpy wizard
tech2 9y ago
Allow me to introduce you to the wizards of the Unseen University...
kybernetikos 9y ago
Bob Howard in the Laundry series by Charles Stross is a wizard who has started out in IT and who does have to go to interminable powerpoint meetings and work through lots of hideous beaurocracy.

juj5 9y ago

Well the wizards at the Boeing factory make fucking things that fly man! And those flying things have even been used to drop nukes. Who is burning them at the stake?

kardianos 9y ago

And this is why I program in Go. Hardware OS Program (no libc, no dynamic libs, no external runtime) Go specializes in "it runs like you read it". I hate magic in my program and I distrust programmers who program like a magician.

cname 9y ago
Go is still a pile of abstractions built on top of another pile of abstractions that almost no one fully groks. It doesn't seem significantly less "magical" than any other commonly-used language, especially from the perspective of non-wizards, even if it might be a better tool for casting certain spells.
computerex 9y ago
I don't know if your "hardware OS program" is representative. Try writing a trivial web application using cutting edge technologies. You'll quickly see how much you have to know to work on even trivial applications.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

No. The only people that seem to get upset about this is the media, because their power is being usurped by Facebook, and Silicon Valley itself. Go 30 mins outside of the Bay Area and everyone thinks Silicon Valley is great, and programmers work magic. Living in this tech bubble gives a skewed view of the world, but really no one cares.

derefr 9y ago
Even the people whose jobs are being displaced by automation?
- ben_w 9y ago
  I get the impression that right now they’re too busy blaming offshoring and immigrants to realise that their jobs have been automated and nobody is doing them.
  - Jach 9y ago
    Or figuring they'll just get another job, or their job will have them do something else instead of whatever it is that got automated.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

Only wizards in some kind of coastal ego bubble More like "Burn the programmer! Adobe has crashed for the third time today!", or "Burn the programmer! YouTube has 100k+ likes on my copyrighted video (that someone else uploaded), and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!"

beefield 9y ago

relevant xkcd flowchart to wizardry: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/

SCHiM 9y ago

Haha yes, many have laid the link between magic and computers/programming. I remember as a child being very interested in magic and that fascination naturally refocussed to computers in my adult life. Also check out this website for a funny parable about computers, DNS, wizards and the NSA: http://grimoire.computer/ http://grimoire.computer/

computerwizard 9y ago

I think about this a lot. To control atoms and construct new systems using language and thoughtforms alone seems as close to magic as you can get.

jhanschoo 9y ago

The notion of a terribly powerful yet unintelligible wizard really isn't that novel a situation. Lawyers have long suffered that role, and among several communities (e.g. anti-vax, alternative med.), medical doctors too.

foxhop 9y ago

I wrote about this in 2011 - http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-alchemy/ http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-alchemy/ Programming is like Alchemy

draw_down 9y ago

To me, many forms of artistry like singing and dance are so much more magical than anything we do. We just type a bunch of shit into computers until they do stuff, poorly.

morgante 9y ago

This metaphor is really stretched thin and doesn't help much with explaining anti-tech sentiments. I really don't see why complicated wizardry is required for something to be magical. That seems to be an assumption coming from the author's genre. There are plenty of brands of magic which include extensive creation of magical artifacts which anyone can use (akin to consumer electronics). As for anti-tech sentiments, I don't think any complicated allegory to burning witches is required. It really just feels like the natural result of technologists gaining wealth—almost every high-earning profession has significant critics (cf. lawyers, investment bankers).

barce 9y ago

'But I can't help but feel, looking at a lot of the media pushback at the moment, that a lot of it is straight-up fantasy novel 101 "Reactions To Wizardry".' If the last US recession is any indication, the elite (in this case, the quants), can ruin a national economy and not get burned. I wish the author gave less vague examples to his claims.

thenomad 9y ago

If people enjoyed this post, you might be interested to hear that the author (me) is currently doing an AMA over on Reddit, too - https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hancock_i_founded_machinima_and_made/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hanco...

choonway 9y ago

There was a magical crystal that blessed the land with bountiful harvest every year, until civil war broke out in the country. Mysteriously the crystal shattered into a thousand pieces and parts of it fell all over the continent. Some parts were irrevocably lost. After the civil war was settled, and the country split in two, famine ravaged both sides. It is up to you, my courageous wizard, to recover the parts that still exists, and to rediscover how to recreate the parts that were destroyed, and reassemble the crystal into a whole again. Hostility from former enemies, unexpected allies, and dark conspiracy abounds. ... Yep, that totally describes my current gig with an MNC right now...

robto 9y ago

This puts me in mind of Aphyr's series on a powerful wizard interviewing in the valley: https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie... https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview I think there are wizards but I'm not one of them.

meheleventyone 9y ago

I’m suspicious of the idea people are afraid of wizards versus wising up to the fact that wizards aren’t as wise and just as society presumed they were. They’ve found out that wizards are just people with a particular skill set.

pdkl95 9y ago

From the first comment: > I don't think we're looking at a Butlerian Jihad any time soon I personally know many people that see something Butlerian Jihad-like as inevitable. Most say they would regret the loss of some technology, but the appeal of being free of complex wizardry trying to manipulate them in ways seem forever outside their understanding has increased a lot over the last few years. A small-ish subset of that group are actively trying to start a Buterian Jihad. Don't write off the possibility of blowback from the growing group of people that feel technology (and the people that make it) are "disrupting" their income wht remains of their agency over their own lives. There are many ways that could play out - most are not full revolts against technology - but predicting the future is hard. What I do know is that when you see pitchforks and torches... it's too late.

japhyr 9y ago

I teach high school math and science, and I fully recognize that most of my students will not end up in math and science-focused careers. So I think pretty carefully about my goals for these students. One clear purpose in everything I ask students to do: take away the sense of "magic" in technological things. I just finished teaching a math class, where the final project was a 3d modeling exercise. Students didn't always enjoy the process, but they were deeply satisfied with their work in the end. Most of them will never model anything again in their lives. But we've removed the idea that when they see an amazingly detailed 3d-printed prosthetic limb, that the designer was doing some kind of magic. They know that the designer worked from the same principles they learned, the only real difference is that the designer enjoyed this work enough to stay with it and become highly proficient at it. These are all students who will not want to burn programmers, but who will instead understand the hard work that goes into well-designed apps and products. They will also know that people who design crappy or harmful products can do much better and much different work.

adamsea 9y ago
This is a great point. I think it is tempting and understandable to, at times, appreciate the "magic" of our profession, but our goal should be able to take away that sense of magic - both in terms of creating programming languages and tools which are more intuitive for human beings, and, as OP says, in terms of education. There will always be some magic in programming. Unnecessary magic, imho, is just another form of obfuscation.
jrs95 9y ago
This is really cool. I had the good luck of having 2 really great math teachers in high school, and seemingly little things like this can really have a lasting impact. One of them taught me both computer science and statistics, and did an amazing job at both. He went way above and beyond the minimum required curriculum for AP CS, so I basically picked up everything I needed to know to get a job just in that class. And for stats, this guy did something I'd never actually seen a teacher do before. Over the course of one semester he'd managed to get the entire class of mostly average students to go from having a typical negative attitude towards math to being genuinely interested and capable of critical thinking that most adults I have met never do. The other teacher taught a variety of math classes, but I had him for pre-calculus. He was really passionate about what he was doing and that rubbed off on everyone. He did an excellent job of relating everything back to real world topics and really seemed to make things click with people in a way that was highly unusual from my perspective. The difference those two were able to make impressed me so much I almost decided to go into teaching, but I didn't have any means of paying for college. Fortunately I was able to get into software without a degree, in part because of the great work those two did.

jrs95 9y ago

So if programmers are wizards, who is our Voldemort that wants us to rule the world? ;)

endgame 9y ago
He who controls the book of faces.
- thenomad 9y ago
  Goddamn, that really does sound sinister as hell.

abecedarius 9y ago

I think of magic as the fantasy of relating to the world around you in the same way as to your own subconscious. This has obvious appeal -- by System 2 standards, your System 1 is a super-powered genie -- and lots of story potential from the familiar difficulty and cross-purposes of that interface. But we need more of the Alan Kay-ish notion of augmenting your System 2 abilities instead (if I have his philosophy roughly right) -- 'magic' in the service of clear thinking instead of mysticism. Environments that invite you to dig into any part that puzzles or frustrates you, figure out the problem, change it. We shouldn't accept the black box so readily.

kbenson 9y ago

(Fun fact: horror games are more intense in VR, by some margin. So terrifying, in fact, that I added a "Low Terror Mode" recently, after reading a significant number of people saying "I'd love to play your game, but I absolutely won't, because it sounds way too scary.") While I would love to play the full terror mode, the low terror mode made me think of a game that replaced the undead horrors you summon with giant puppies that lick your foes until they lose all feelings of anger. A silly idea, to be sure, but it would be fun to play if the theme was expanded on just to see the insanity, and that's the stuff cult (in the media sense...) followings talk about decades later.

AndrewDucker 9y ago
I think it's Skyrim that has a mod to replace the giant spiders with bears...
thenomad 9y ago
Hah! That's an interesting idea. I might just think about doing that for an April Fools' or similar...

AlexCoventry 9y ago

This reminds me of the hostility towards the Tinkers in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War.

throw2016 9y ago

This whole mystifying programming may be good for the ego but its not real. Anyone sufficiently interested can learn programming, and even work as a programmer without a degree and the 3-4 years of education and training other professions require. And programming is not particularly difficult, people learn for more than 16-20 years of their life. Those interested will pick it up. There is something seriously wrong in the tech community when many are quick and even eager to think of others as stupid. This is not only immature but its disconnected from reality. I think many should spend compulsory time with kids to understand how truly wonderful the human brain is.

wavegeek 9y ago
> many are quick and even eager to think of others as stupid There is no hard data I could find but I would guess* that the average programmer probably has a higher IQ than 100. So if we define "stupid" as "not as smart as oneself" then this belief is probably somewhat true. *Having worked with a lot of different kinds of programmers and having also worked with the general public.

kkotak 9y ago

If anyone's burning the programmers is the AI, Block chain programmers. Very soon, the industry will need/have a very small fraction of programmers than what we have today.

kemonocode 9y ago

I think it's less of an issue of programmers in general in danger of being seen as witches and more of a certain breed of programmer. You know the type. Not even the obviously "bad guys" and "hackers" induce that much of a visceral reaction. The sort of kid so detached from their community that yes, they might as well live in a haughty ivory tower with a handful of their peers and bring their arcane gizmos wherever they go and look down upon muggles in disdain. Those are I'm worried about giving the rest of us spellweavers a bad rap.

kral 9y ago

I won't call it magic, for me programming is like alchemy.

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