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I think it's interesting that people associate programming with magic, but I don't think it's the most enlightening comparison. The actual magic, from my perspe
by bjterry 12y ago
I think it's interesting that people associate programming with magic, but I don't think it's the most enlightening comparison. The actual magic, from my perspective, is social skills and the ability to organize/manipulate people.
People like magic narratives because magic acts as a force multiplier for a single person. The force multiplier in real life is the ability to organize a bunch of other people to do stuff for you. The real Merlin is Steve Jobs or Obama. Just like magic, the ability to do this is generally an inborn talent (theoretically it could be learned, but you can't do anything to change whether it's the kind of thing you like to do, just like you can't do anything to make yourself like golf enough to make yourself practice as much as Tiger Woods).
There are weaknesses to this comparison, of course. In real life when you are using social engineering to further your goals, you become beholden to the network of interests that support you (e.g. politicians, customers). Also, in real life the ability to gain positions of influence is not distributed in any egalitarian manner.
One of the reasons magic is appealing to programmer types, is because they tend to be weaker in these areas, and they wish that they could have access to the same sort of power, but based on the things they are good at (studying tomes, complex incantations) rather than the things they aren't good at (networking, salesmanship). If magic were real, I would definitely be dedicating a lot of time to mastering that, but even knowing the power of politics I am not particularly interested in becoming a politician.
- zem 12y agoit's not just a question of beholdenness or privilege - the real distinction between technology-as-magic and social-engineering-as-magic is how the bill for your force multiplication is paid. if you manipulate/organise people into doing things for you you have definitely achieved some sort of leverage, but there's no real feeling of magic because you know that at the bottom of the pyramid, other human beings have had to put the work in. what makes magic magic is that the forces you manipulate and control come for "free" - not in the sense that you don't have to do any work to access them, but in the sense that any output over and above your input is drawn from some more fundamental reservoir of universal energy.
- current_call 12y agoThe ability to organize other people is not the only force multiplier in reality, and it's very little like magic. Programming is like magic because software is divorced from reality but also steeped in it. SICP does a better job of explaining this then I can. "We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells." "A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform." The only other force multipliers I am aware of that have the same property are language and math. SICP source if anyone wants to read the whole thing. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-9.html#%_chap_1 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-9.html#...