There is nothing magical about computing (unless you use Source Mage [1]). But, I have to agree with the author: people tend to use the word magic if they canno

There is nothing magical about computing (unless you use Source Mage [1]). But, I have to agree with the author: people tend to use the word magic if they cannot immediately grasp the meaning of a piece of code. This code might use a language construct we are not familiar with, or implement a complex O(log N) algorithm, or it might use a magic number [2]. In most cases, however, it is worth to spend time to understand such code. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...