3 ms·

"who cares about something as mundane as that? I want to do magic." I like how the word "magic" keeps poping up on each Lisp-related article I read. And the art

• willismichael 14y ago
  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -Arthur C Clarke Whenever "magic" is mentioned in articles like these, you can probably safely substitute "higher-order abstractions that aren't available in the language(s) I'm accustomed to". Of course it's easier (and more fun) to say "magic".
  • bloaf 14y ago
    The best use of "magic" I've seen came from a kids TV show where the protagonist would simply refer to new or mysterious things as "magic" even if the other characters offered him an explanation of how the thing worked. To me it was a perfect example of black-box abstraction. Its magic because we know what it is doing, but the how is not intuitively obvious.
    • gknoy 14y ago
      And, as long as we know how to invoke it reliably and properly, we don't __need__ to understand how. (Though, being nerds, we often want to.) I agree: "Magic" is one of the best shorthands for "We can explain that later but for now let's assume this works".
• derefr 14y ago
  It's just Abelson and Sussman's influence; it's their chosen metaphor for explaining programming in 6.001 + SICP (called, appropriately, "the Wizard book.")
• _ZeD_ 14y ago
  poor, poor prolog... (macros? unification is the real black magic stuff!)