Burn the Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Burn the Programmer

#101

Post by LyndsySimon » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 5:59 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #26

everyone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or metalworker. We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop completely novel things or masterworks. So…

I think the craft aspect is somewhat romanticized and that much of programming work is more like a kind of accounting or some other clerical bureaucratic trade.

In my experience, that depends entirely on your role.

I've found that my place is within a team of 5If all I were doing every day was implementing yet another CRUD form, then I would feel the same way you've described.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#102

Post by everyone » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #91

everyone wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be an architect, worked at it for a good few years, and only got into programming when I was approaching my 30's. Ive since found that my architecture experience gives me a huge advantage over my peers when it comes software architecture and project management.

Architecture was my other potential major in college. Took drafting classes in high school and everything. I think there is definitely something to the mindset correlation.

I have this idea to write an article on how architecture and general design was taught to me. I think software dev education could benefit from that approach. We were never told how to design, it was almost all studio work. We would be given a site and a brief and then off we go and design a building. We could get advice from our lecturers + also there were regular 'crits' where you have to put your work up on the wall in front of everyone and give a brief presentation, then the lecturers and everyone is free to critique it. It takes a year or two or three, but going through this over and over you do eventually develop your own design methods.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#103

Post by throwanem » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #74

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…

Diane Duane's Young Wizards series is more "magic as programming" but it's also quite good if you like stuff that's fairly YA pitched. It bridges the gap between "magic is deeply mysterious and unknowable" and "with the right set of words and invocations you can teleport" in an unusually deft way. Magic uses a more declarative language than an imperative one, but it's composed in much the same way as you might compos…

Aren't they all, a bit?

Re: Burn the Programmer

#104

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

b0rsuk wrote: post #51

dkarl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people look at skilled construction contractors and assume they could be just as good with a very small amount of study and practice. People see us as having a completely alien ability that they intrinsically lack. That makes us like Harry Potter wizards, people with an inborn gift that makes us capable of learning things that are beyond the reach of normal people. The difference between us and wizards i…

That's quite true. When you say you're a plumber, people can at least ask half-assed questions or provide a story when they were doing that themselves. When you say you're a programmer, the conversation usually ends with "Oh.". They have literally no clue how to get into the area. How many of you have girlfriends who are genuinely interested in your craft and regularly talk with you about it ? Say, once per week. But…

[deleted]

Re: Burn the Programmer

#105

Post by beefield » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

relevant xkcd flowchart to wizardry:

https://xkcd.com/627/

Re: Burn the Programmer

#106

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #35

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.

My experience has been that what we consider easy or impressive has very little in common with what others find trivial or impressive. For example, soon after I got my degree I was making browser based games, and the artist I was working with was really impressed with the particle effect fireworks I’d added to the highscores table out of boredom and was expecting to be told to remove. And, on the other hand, a real t…

I remember a project when I was a bit younger and naive, where we had a 3d view of the world, and my job was to implement the display of the sky. So I went off and dug into the research and literature and ended up with a nice efficient C++/OpenGL implementation of [1], including sunrise and sunset effects and haze. Also added night with a realistic ephemeris containing the moon in the correct position and phase and the top 500 or so brightest stars.

The feedback was all negative. The boss and the designers basically said, "Just make it blue."

A couple episodes like that help make you sufficiently jaded and cynical, but also teach you pay attention to the requirements and not to go overboard.

1: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/papers/sunsky/sunsky.pdf

Re: Burn the Programmer

#107

Post by Raphmedia » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:10 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #70

Raphmedia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ah, K&M. Lots of potential, many fun moments, but it's far from rationalist fiction. Still, if you ever need wish fulfillment that the time you spend at work beating down technical debt could instead allow you to fight monsters and cast spells leveraging the mana pool of a giant robot, it's a fun read/watch. From an unofficial (and somewhat grammatically atrocious) English translation of the original novel [0]: > Nor…

I also really loved the episode of "In Another World With My Smartphone" where the character aquires the spell "program" which lets a caster enchant a physical object with a command.

The regular wizards use it to, let's say, make a door open when someone says "open" or other minor one-step commands.

The protagonist, a modern human stuck in a magical world, uses it differently. He creates sequences with it. He scripts complex programs.

[Minor Spoiler] As an example, he ends up creating a magical pistol. When the users speak "reload", the pistol (which the character imbued with a few spells using "enchant") casts a detection spell to finds the closest bullets. If bullets are found, the pistol then casts the spell "aports" on it. The bullets are teleported into the chamber of the pistol. He uses the same concept but with transmogrification enchantments to add voice commands such as "sword mode" or "pistol mode" that transform the pistol into a sword and vice-versa.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#108

Post by SCHiM » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

Haha yes, many have laid the link between magic and computers/programming. I remember as a child being very interested in magic and that fascination naturally refocussed to computers in my adult life.

Also check out this website for a funny parable about computers, DNS, wizards and the NSA: http://grimoire.computer/

Re: Burn the Programmer

#109

Post by rtuulik » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:12 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #29

It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."

Maybe, but its more likely that majority of higher ranking wizards would focus on growing their sheep herding business. :)

http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/2017/02/22/the-wizards-and...

Re: Burn the Programmer

#110

Post by icebraining » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 6:13 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #98

b0rsuk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite true. When you say you're a plumber, people can at least ask half-assed questions or provide a story when they were doing that themselves. When you say you're a programmer, the conversation usually ends with "Oh.". They have literally no clue how to get into the area. How many of you have girlfriends who are genuinely interested in your craft and regularly talk with you about it ? Say, once per week. But…

Quite a lot of times, actually. It helps to work in gamedev, but I think a lot of developers can have interesting and meaningful conversations with outsiders about their work if they focus on the domain, things that they are building and problems they're solving, not the inner workings of languages and frameworks.

What if you write kernels or compilers for a living? Talking about a business domain is cheating :D