People often forget how bad things were in 2000s. A "serious engineering discipline" usually meant Java and "writing a unit test and five lines of docstring for

People often forget how bad things were in 2000s. A "serious engineering discipline" usually meant Java and "writing a unit test and five lines of docstring for every get/set method". I'd go for wizards and alchemy any day. Even today many of the "serious engineers" of the time still roam the industry and show up for interviews every now and then, completely unable to write code. Some even capture younger souls into this trap, a sad picture.