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Burn the Programmer

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Re: Burn the Programmer

#11

Post by mrguyorama »

gallerdude wrote: post #8

When I was a preteen, I'd watch Notch's ld48 programming streams, and I'd just be confused. I had read the basics of if-statements, for-loops, and functions, but he was using them in a way beyond my comprehension. Later I discovered MIT's Scratch, and it let me figure things out on my own: games, physics, genetic algorithms. I think programming is portrayed to be more difficult than it is. It's a mixture between prog…

I think 90% of the difficulty of learning to program is building and interpreting your mental models of how everything works. This is unfortunate, because everyone's mental models are different, and it's the same problem we see in math teaching, where things are extremely difficult until it "clicks" and suddenly it's so easy

Re: Burn the Programmer

#12

Post by jszymborski »

I find it at the very least a little ironic that the author used consumer technology to simulate magic abilities (to such an immersive state that he had to put a low-horror mode) and uses his success in this department as an argument that consumer technology doesn't very closely convey the feeling of magic.

I appreciate the argument being made, but I can't say that I accept the premise that (sufficiently advanced) consumer technology is often unlike magic.

Hell, just sending out an invisible beam of light towards a magic black box so that it can remotely open up a window to a lands that may or may not exist is an awfully cool reality to hide behind the rather normal sounding acronym "TV", and that's hardly cutting edge technology.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#14

Post by CM30 »

marsrover wrote: post #3

You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.

Probably depends on what field they're in and how much 'further ahead' they seem compared to everyone else. I suspect some people think of people/teams who are really good at programming video games as 'magicians'. And when they're so good at programming that they outshine pretty much the entire rest of their 'industry' or 'niche', then I can definitely see people treating them like magicians. There were certainly people who saw the developer of the SMW hack Brutal Mario as one, thanks to the huge amounts of custom code present for the new enemies/bosses/blocks/level gimmicks/whatever else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa41RSwiCc

But eh, I suspect a good programmer in most fields wouldn't be seen as 'magical'.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#15

Post by NikolaeVarius »

stryan wrote: post #10

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…

The books Daemon/Freedom by Daniel Suarez was pretty entertaining on that front. The idea that people could literally affect the world around them via "magic spells" which mapped aliases of a invented language that would be picked up by microphones and then executed on computers.

There is a section that muses about the future of humanity and how in the near future, these would literally seem like magic to anyone who doens't have technical know how, and for all intents and purposes, it was.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#16

Post by fermigier »

"...Ever tried to set up a Postfix server?" is the new "...Ever tried to set up a Sendmail server?".

(When I was younger, I was told by a veteran sysadmin that only 5 persons in the world knew how to configure Sendmail directly, everyone else was relying on preprocessing scripts written by the aforementioned wizards).

Edit: my point is that Postfix is actually quite easy to configure, compared to Sendmail which was the standard in the 90s.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#17

Post by Raphmedia »

stryan wrote: post #10

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…

> As a side note, if anyone's interested in looking a bit more into "programming as magic" there's a great book series called The Wizardry

If you like that kind of thing and you enjoy/don't mind anime, there's also the serie Knight’s & Magic. It is about a programmer being reborn in a world where people wield big "golem" armors. The protagonist then proceed to make his own version, completly disregarding the philosophy of that world. Thinking of those golems as nothing more than machines and using magic as nothing more than "inputs/outputs" for those machines and the world.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/knights-magic

"A genius programmer and hardcore robot otaku is reborn into a world of knights and magic, where huge robots called Silhouette Knights roar across the land! Now reborn as Ernesti Echevalier, he uses his vast knowledge of machines and programming talents to begin to make his ultimate robot. But his actions have unexpected results...?! The dreams of a robot otaku will change the world!"

Re: Burn the Programmer

#18

Post by arethuza »

yetihehe wrote: post #6
marsrover wrote: post #3

You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.

It depends on what those "wizards" do. If it's just making some formula in spreadsheet work, it's not too awesome. If it's stopping time[1], that might be more "magical". [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/11/09/stop-motion-with-the-time-gl...

"it's not too awesome"

Maybe if you had seen some of the eldritch devious monstrosities I've seen people create in Excel (even without VBA) you might reconsider that statement.

Be very worried if someone says "we have this Excel spreadsheet that needs to be turned into an app"....

Re: Burn the Programmer

#19

Post by adrianN »

stryan wrote: post #10

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality also explores that topic a bit.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#20

Post by stryan »

Raphmedia wrote: post #17
stryan wrote: post #10

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…

> As a side note, if anyone's interested in looking a bit more into "programming as magic" there's a great book series called The Wizardry If you like that kind of thing and you enjoy/don't mind anime, there's also the serie Knight’s & Magic. It is about a programmer being reborn in a world where people wield big "golem" armors. The protagonist then proceed to make his own version, completly disregarding the philosop…

I did see that while browsing newer shows the other day but I guess I didn't see the programming part and thought it was too generic to watch. I'll have to give it another look.

Thanks for the recommendation!

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