18 ms·

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 boile

by 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.
  - andrewflnr 9y ago
    Smartcoral's user interface is also pretty similar, though, and that shows up in Quantum Thief proper. :)
Raphmedia 9y ago
> 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 If you like that kind of thing and you enjoy/don't mind anime, there's also the serie Knight’s & Magic. It is about a programmer being reborn in a world where people wield big "golem" armors. The protagonist then proceed to make his own version, completly disregarding the philosophy of that world. Thinking of those golems as nothing more than machines and using magic as nothing more than "inputs/outputs" for those machines and the world. http://www.crunchyroll.com/knights-magic http://www.crunchyroll.com/knights-magic "A genius programmer and hardcore robot otaku is reborn into a world of knights and magic, where huge robots called Silhouette Knights roar across the land! Now reborn as Ernesti Echevalier, he uses his vast knowledge of machines and programming talents to begin to make his ultimate robot. But his actions have unexpected results...?! The dreams of a robot otaku will change the world!"
- stryan 9y ago
  I did see that while browsing newer shows the other day but I guess I didn't see the programming part and thought it was too generic to watch. I'll have to give it another look. Thanks for the recommendation!
  - Raphmedia 9y ago
    It's yet another take on the "regular modern human gets teleported into a magical world and becomes super strong because he has knowledge" trope that is all over the place in recent animes. That being said, it's an interesting point of view. The character goes so far as taking personal a fight against a "golem plane" solely because he fears that the invention of planes will means that this world, like ours, won't have mechas. He doesn't have a care in the world but to use magic as a means to program mechas and completely disregards the fact that magic should be exciting in itself.
  - mzzter 9y ago
    I really loved the pacing of Knights and Magic, but the fact that the MC was a programmer in a past life is only relevant for maybe 3 episodes.
adrianN 9y ago
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality also explores that topic a bit.
- mLuby 9y ago
  Better to read the review/summary as HPatMoR is extremely long and really more of an Ender's Game fanfic than an exploration of magic by rational means. (It does happen briefly but is quickly forgotten.) http://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/#bad-plotting http://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/#bad-plotting >At the start of the story he has a legitimate positive agenda--he wants to use science to uncover the secrets of magic. As the story develops, however, he completely loses sight of that goal, and he instead becomes just a passenger in the plot--he competes in Quirrell’s games and goes through school like any other student. When Voldemort starts including Hariezer in his plot, Hariezer floats along in a completely reactive way,etc. >Not until spoiler dies, near the end of the story, does Hariezer pick up a positive goal again (ending death) and he does absolutely nothing to achieve it
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    I gather you didn't like HPMoR, like the author of the review? Here's my advice: do not read that review, even the introduction is full of spoilers. I personally loved HPMoR, even more so than the original series. I also disagree with most of the review, either factually (I believe most of the science is sound), or because I have a different interpretation (how Harry lacking agency is even a problem?).
    - mLuby 9y ago
      Correct. (and good point about spoilers) :) I just had high hopes for a story of scientific inquiry into magic. (Still do) Switched from source to review after it became clear that the story was more of a power fantasy/soapbox for the author.
b0rsuk 9y ago
I feel disgust for programming domains where I have to use a lot of boilerplate. This is simply because... I can't remember arbitrary bits of information well. I memorize much better if it's something connected by logic.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  The presence of large amounts of boilerplate signals an opportunity for abstraction wins.
mordechai9000 9y ago
As I recall (it's been years) it was based on Forth because a stack based postfix language is easy to implement. It can be parsed and executed in a single sequential pass.
- stryan 9y ago
  Right it was Forth! I remember reading that got me interested in stack-based programming languages. Maybe it was in a later book he wrote something based off APL.
jimbokun 9y ago
This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reasoning about the code as difficult as possible.
- thinkpad20 9y ago
  That's exactly how I feel about express middleware...
  - randallsquared 9y ago
    Come to https://github.com/zeit/micro https://github.com/zeit/micro ... :)
- SilasX 9y ago
  That's exactly how I felt about Ruby on Rails.
  - anon151516888 9y ago
    It's also why I prefer more "straightforward" libraries such as Tornado or CherryPy.
    - SilasX 9y ago
      Wait, that's contrasting to other Python libraries that use the Rails/Spring magic? Which ones?
      - falcor84 9y ago
        Django for example has a lot of magic. A lot of the development process consists of adding fields with particular names to classes that have a long inheritance chain of their own, and it's not trivial at all to understand what all of your options are and how they work behind the scenes.
mindcrime 9y ago
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. Sounds a lot like the "Magic 2.0" series by Scott Meyer. https://www.goodreads.com/series/131379-magic-2-0 https://www.goodreads.com/series/131379-magic-2-0 In that world, "magic" is very much a direct result of programming. I've read the first two books in the series and enjoyed them a lot. For anybody whose into that sor of thing, I recommend this series highly.
- shostack 9y ago
  Just finished the third book. So far 1 and 2 (which takes place in Atlantis which may have borrowed heavily from Apple's design philosophy) are my favorites. They definitely focus more on the programming nuance. It's also cool how they introduce technology and interfaces from different periods of computing due to the time traveling aspect.
roywiggins 9y ago
Diane Duane's Young Wizards series is more "magic as programming" but it's also quite good if you like stuff that's fairly YA pitched. It bridges the gap between "magic is deeply mysterious and unknowable" and "with the right set of words and invocations you can teleport" in an unusually deft way. Magic uses a more declarative language than an imperative one, but it's composed in much the same way as you might compose a program. A magic Apple II makes an appearance, if I'm remembering correctly...
- throwanem 9y ago
  Aren't they all, a bit?
throwaway7645 9y ago
That sounds neat. Target age?
throwanem 9y ago
Forth, I believe it was, rather than APL, and specifically for the simple semantics and quick composition of a stack-based language. I recall being impressed with the author's rather detailed, but still likely accessible to non-wizards, description of the decision process and its outcome.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  My favorite bit was summoning the Interpreter from Starting Forth -- you could recognize him from the description before it was explained. I mean, if you've read Starting Forth already.
blattimwind 9y ago
> If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. I assume I am not the only one who destroyed at least some amount of his personal data doing computer magic [1]. This would be analogous to a spell going wrong, burning the witches' hand or something similar. [1] Be it an incorrect incantation of rm, or just a poorly aimed flick with the pixie pointer.
- oillio 9y ago
  I am showing my age here. I destroyed a CRT monitor once when I used the wrong incantation for xorg.
  - amatecha 9y ago
    Whoa, what? I'd be curious to hear more about that... How could some software config harm a display? Incorrect sync rates or something? ...and yeah, I am old enough to have used CRT displays for many years of my life, just never seen one get damaged like that! :)
    - mcguire 9y ago
      Used to be, you configured X for your monitor and video card by editing a config file that specified the assorted timings and so forth. Yes, you could make your monitor very unhappy with the wrong settings. This is probably the most useful thing ESR ever wrote: http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/ http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    I remember that thunk.
  - msla 9y ago
    My sympathies. I remember the feeling in my gut I got when I had to manipulate XFree86 (what distros shipped with when I had to do this the last time) and worrying that I'd lose my one and only monitor, but it never happened to me.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
As long as we're recommending things, I'm tossing "Off To Be The Wizard" into the pool. Magic is done by modifying a secret file that modifies the world; you can create macros that modify it for you, etc., etc. Shenanigans ensue. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EF8Z32I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EF8Z32I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
msoucy 9y ago
Similarly, the Ra story on qntm.org has magic be well-defined to the point of having an intentionally boring college lecture, with the magic spells being both consistent and recognizable. The author did a writeup of some of how the language is structured.
berbec 9y ago
I recall enjoying that series. Correct me if I'm wrong, but at some point he brings a friend over to his world and gets made fun of for programming magic in Forth.
arkh 9y ago
If you like this kind of stories and don't mind a work in progress you whould try https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/61ya08/oh_this_has_not_gone_well/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/61ya08/oh_this_has_not... where a nerd ends up in a fantasy world.
- citruscomputing 9y ago
  I love /r/HFY! Here are a few of my favorites: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/250m73/oc_no_graves_for_the_forgotten/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/250m73/oc_no_graves_fo... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/249hj7/oc_invitation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/249hj7/oc_invitation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/25qa83/oc_the_gods_sleep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/25qa83/oc_the_gods_sle... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b1vqr/oc_humanitys_debt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b1vqr/oc_humanitys_de... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3baheq/a_kingdom_of_ashes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3baheq/a_kingdom_of_as... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3m704i/oc_cultural_exchange_rates/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3m704i/oc_cultural_exc... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3jfu5t/oc_assimilation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3jfu5t/oc_assimilation... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4868zu/oc_janitor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4868zu/oc_janitor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/45tsrn/the_hunt_inspired_by_the_lion_whisperer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/45tsrn/the_hunt_inspir...
vikiomega9 9y ago
Obligatory reference to Vernor Vinge's Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky that explores programmer archeologists or programmer at arms.

by stryan 9y ago

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.
- andrewflnr 9y ago
  Smartcoral's user interface is also pretty similar, though, and that shows up in Quantum Thief proper. :)

Raphmedia 9y ago

> 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 If you like that kind of thing and you enjoy/don't mind anime, there's also the serie Knight’s & Magic. It is about a programmer being reborn in a world where people wield big "golem" armors. The protagonist then proceed to make his own version, completly disregarding the philosophy of that world. Thinking of those golems as nothing more than machines and using magic as nothing more than "inputs/outputs" for those machines and the world. http://www.crunchyroll.com/knights-magic http://www.crunchyroll.com/knights-magic "A genius programmer and hardcore robot otaku is reborn into a world of knights and magic, where huge robots called Silhouette Knights roar across the land! Now reborn as Ernesti Echevalier, he uses his vast knowledge of machines and programming talents to begin to make his ultimate robot. But his actions have unexpected results...?! The dreams of a robot otaku will change the world!"

stryan 9y ago
I did see that while browsing newer shows the other day but I guess I didn't see the programming part and thought it was too generic to watch. I'll have to give it another look. Thanks for the recommendation!
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  It's yet another take on the "regular modern human gets teleported into a magical world and becomes super strong because he has knowledge" trope that is all over the place in recent animes. That being said, it's an interesting point of view. The character goes so far as taking personal a fight against a "golem plane" solely because he fears that the invention of planes will means that this world, like ours, won't have mechas. He doesn't have a care in the world but to use magic as a means to program mechas and completely disregards the fact that magic should be exciting in itself.
- mzzter 9y ago
  I really loved the pacing of Knights and Magic, but the fact that the MC was a programmer in a past life is only relevant for maybe 3 episodes.

adrianN 9y ago

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality also explores that topic a bit.

mLuby 9y ago
Better to read the review/summary as HPatMoR is extremely long and really more of an Ender's Game fanfic than an exploration of magic by rational means. (It does happen briefly but is quickly forgotten.) http://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/#bad-plotting http://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/#bad-plotting >At the start of the story he has a legitimate positive agenda--he wants to use science to uncover the secrets of magic. As the story develops, however, he completely loses sight of that goal, and he instead becomes just a passenger in the plot--he competes in Quirrell’s games and goes through school like any other student. When Voldemort starts including Hariezer in his plot, Hariezer floats along in a completely reactive way,etc. >Not until spoiler dies, near the end of the story, does Hariezer pick up a positive goal again (ending death) and he does absolutely nothing to achieve it
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  I gather you didn't like HPMoR, like the author of the review? Here's my advice: do not read that review, even the introduction is full of spoilers. I personally loved HPMoR, even more so than the original series. I also disagree with most of the review, either factually (I believe most of the science is sound), or because I have a different interpretation (how Harry lacking agency is even a problem?).
  - mLuby 9y ago
    Correct. (and good point about spoilers) :) I just had high hopes for a story of scientific inquiry into magic. (Still do) Switched from source to review after it became clear that the story was more of a power fantasy/soapbox for the author.

b0rsuk 9y ago

I feel disgust for programming domains where I have to use a lot of boilerplate. This is simply because... I can't remember arbitrary bits of information well. I memorize much better if it's something connected by logic.

quotemstr 9y ago
The presence of large amounts of boilerplate signals an opportunity for abstraction wins.

mordechai9000 9y ago

As I recall (it's been years) it was based on Forth because a stack based postfix language is easy to implement. It can be parsed and executed in a single sequential pass.

stryan 9y ago
Right it was Forth! I remember reading that got me interested in stack-based programming languages. Maybe it was in a later book he wrote something based off APL.

jimbokun 9y ago

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reasoning about the code as difficult as possible.

thinkpad20 9y ago
That's exactly how I feel about express middleware...
- randallsquared 9y ago
  Come to https://github.com/zeit/micro https://github.com/zeit/micro ... :)
SilasX 9y ago
That's exactly how I felt about Ruby on Rails.
- anon151516888 9y ago
  It's also why I prefer more "straightforward" libraries such as Tornado or CherryPy.
  - SilasX 9y ago
    Wait, that's contrasting to other Python libraries that use the Rails/Spring magic? Which ones?
    - falcor84 9y ago
      Django for example has a lot of magic. A lot of the development process consists of adding fields with particular names to classes that have a long inheritance chain of their own, and it's not trivial at all to understand what all of your options are and how they work behind the scenes.

mindcrime 9y ago

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. Sounds a lot like the "Magic 2.0" series by Scott Meyer. https://www.goodreads.com/series/131379-magic-2-0 https://www.goodreads.com/series/131379-magic-2-0 In that world, "magic" is very much a direct result of programming. I've read the first two books in the series and enjoyed them a lot. For anybody whose into that sor of thing, I recommend this series highly.

shostack 9y ago
Just finished the third book. So far 1 and 2 (which takes place in Atlantis which may have borrowed heavily from Apple's design philosophy) are my favorites. They definitely focus more on the programming nuance. It's also cool how they introduce technology and interfaces from different periods of computing due to the time traveling aspect.

roywiggins 9y ago

Diane Duane's Young Wizards series is more "magic as programming" but it's also quite good if you like stuff that's fairly YA pitched. It bridges the gap between "magic is deeply mysterious and unknowable" and "with the right set of words and invocations you can teleport" in an unusually deft way. Magic uses a more declarative language than an imperative one, but it's composed in much the same way as you might compose a program. A magic Apple II makes an appearance, if I'm remembering correctly...

throwanem 9y ago
Aren't they all, a bit?

throwaway7645 9y ago

That sounds neat. Target age?

throwanem 9y ago

Forth, I believe it was, rather than APL, and specifically for the simple semantics and quick composition of a stack-based language. I recall being impressed with the author's rather detailed, but still likely accessible to non-wizards, description of the decision process and its outcome.

abecedarius 9y ago
My favorite bit was summoning the Interpreter from Starting Forth -- you could recognize him from the description before it was explained. I mean, if you've read Starting Forth already.

blattimwind 9y ago

> If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. I assume I am not the only one who destroyed at least some amount of his personal data doing computer magic [1]. This would be analogous to a spell going wrong, burning the witches' hand or something similar. [1] Be it an incorrect incantation of rm, or just a poorly aimed flick with the pixie pointer.

oillio 9y ago
I am showing my age here. I destroyed a CRT monitor once when I used the wrong incantation for xorg.
- amatecha 9y ago
  Whoa, what? I'd be curious to hear more about that... How could some software config harm a display? Incorrect sync rates or something? ...and yeah, I am old enough to have used CRT displays for many years of my life, just never seen one get damaged like that! :)
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Used to be, you configured X for your monitor and video card by editing a config file that specified the assorted timings and so forth. Yes, you could make your monitor very unhappy with the wrong settings. This is probably the most useful thing ESR ever wrote: http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/ http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/
- noir_lord 9y ago
  I remember that thunk.
- msla 9y ago
  My sympathies. I remember the feeling in my gut I got when I had to manipulate XFree86 (what distros shipped with when I had to do this the last time) and worrying that I'd lose my one and only monitor, but it never happened to me.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

As long as we're recommending things, I'm tossing "Off To Be The Wizard" into the pool. Magic is done by modifying a secret file that modifies the world; you can create macros that modify it for you, etc., etc. Shenanigans ensue. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EF8Z32I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EF8Z32I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

msoucy 9y ago

Similarly, the Ra story on qntm.org has magic be well-defined to the point of having an intentionally boring college lecture, with the magic spells being both consistent and recognizable. The author did a writeup of some of how the language is structured.

berbec 9y ago

I recall enjoying that series. Correct me if I'm wrong, but at some point he brings a friend over to his world and gets made fun of for programming magic in Forth.

arkh 9y ago

If you like this kind of stories and don't mind a work in progress you whould try https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/61ya08/oh_this_has_not_gone_well/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/61ya08/oh_this_has_not... where a nerd ends up in a fantasy world.

citruscomputing 9y ago
I love /r/HFY! Here are a few of my favorites: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/250m73/oc_no_graves_for_the_forgotten/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/250m73/oc_no_graves_fo... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/249hj7/oc_invitation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/249hj7/oc_invitation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/25qa83/oc_the_gods_sleep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/25qa83/oc_the_gods_sle... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b1vqr/oc_humanitys_debt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b1vqr/oc_humanitys_de... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3baheq/a_kingdom_of_ashes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3baheq/a_kingdom_of_as... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3m704i/oc_cultural_exchange_rates/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3m704i/oc_cultural_exc... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3jfu5t/oc_assimilation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3jfu5t/oc_assimilation... https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4868zu/oc_janitor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4868zu/oc_janitor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/45tsrn/the_hunt_inspired_by_the_lion_whisperer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/45tsrn/the_hunt_inspir...

vikiomega9 9y ago

Obligatory reference to Vernor Vinge's Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky that explores programmer archeologists or programmer at arms.