I am an "early" programmer. I'm on Chapter 7 of Hartl's Rails Tutorial, took a step back to learn Ruby early on and continued. This was all supplementing my k

I am an "early" programmer. I'm on Chapter 7 of Hartl's Rails Tutorial, took a step back to learn Ruby early on and continued. This was all supplementing my knowledge of HTML, CSS and some basic JS. I recently decided to start the "From NAND to Tetris" Coursera course which led me to starting Petzold's "Code" and then this article comes along. There are people like my wife who have zero knowledge of coding, and likely won't ever care enough about it to make it through this article (I tried, she didn't get very far). They just have no interest, and I can respect that. However for people like myself, I've realized that the more layers of the onion I peel back, the more intrigued I become. When I think about it, I was fascinated by fantasy-based magic systems when I was younger. I'm talking things like D&D, Mage: The Ascension, etc. Then I read "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook and realized that I was sucked in at the end when he realized how he could harness the basic "first principles" of this fantasy magic system to build abstractions that allowed for modern day coding principles. My mind was blown, but I didn't realize just how much at the time. Harry Potter interested me from the standpoint of "wow, I'd love to learn magic in an academic environment--how cool would that be?" And then I found myself hooked on the Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman which got as deep as I'd ever seen a book get on some of the mechanics of the actual magic system. Finally, I put two and two together and realized that what appealed to me about all of this was the gradual understanding/building of a complex system based on its simple component parts, and the deep knowledge that was needed to master it. Then I realized that this was why I'm currently geeking out on going under the hood of modern day abstractions and working up from First Principles. Again, I'm an "early" programmer. I don't fully grok half the crap I read. But I've realized that learning software development on my own is about as close as I'll ever get to working real, modern day magic. Clarke's 3rd law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is very much top of mind lately. The fact that I can twiddle my fingers on a couple buttons and conjure up pictures, video, any information I want, etc. is pure magic. There are many people out there like me who are amazed by the raw scope of how far we've come, and this article did an amazing job at reminding me of that, even though I may not have been the target audience, and that is why I enjoyed it immensely. Some people are scared and overwhelmed by complexity, while others seek to understand it and tear it apart. I firmly believe the latter would have much more interest in this article than the former.