"This is the root of my curmudgeoniness: Magic is never worth it. 99% of the time, Magic breaks. And when it does, and someone inevitably asks me to help fix it

"This is the root of my curmudgeoniness: Magic is never worth it. 99% of the time, Magic breaks. And when it does, and someone inevitably asks me to help fix it, I do it by getting out the machete and chopping out all the happy shiny convenient shit until you can see what is actually going on. And when you dig through the Magic and try to figure out what the hell is actually going on, most of the time it’s either stupid and broken by design, or it’s not very magical at all and you’re just like “why didn’t you just say this in the first place?” "Over and over again, it turns out that there is no such thing as Magic, and anyone who says otherwise is skimming over details that will bite you in the ass later on. This is fine for many purposes, because 90% of programs are small hacks and one-off tools and so “later” very seldom actually happens." Oh, yeah. This. So much this. A dump-truck load of this. Even better when everybody is using different Magic, or the guy who set up this Magic left two years ago and everything has been done my cargo-cult since.