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Burn the Programmer

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Re: Burn the Programmer

#111

Post by ben_w »

wruza wrote: post #75
b0rsuk wrote: post #30

Another analogy that I can't shake off is True Name and search engines. Since the dawn of time folk tales placed emphasis on true name of people and objects. Knowing the true name grants one power over something or someone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name Knowing the true name of someone lets you put it in a search engine and find out about him/her. There are some sleazy smartphone apps which let you do even…

As true names are unique (are they?), they seem more like debug console credentials, where you can ultimately control or threat the existence of named being.

  > rm -rf Donald Trump
  -rm: Donald: No such person or object
  -rm: Trump: No such person or object

Re: Burn the Programmer

#112

Post by cbhl »

Raphmedia wrote: post #107
btown wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I highly recommend reading the light-novel translations of "In Another World With My Smartphone" as well! You can buy them on Amazon Kindle, or you can subscribe to read the pre-prints at http://j-novel.club/.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#113

Post by ben_w »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #101
mbrock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 5 If all I were doing every day was implementing yet another CRUD form, then I would feel the same way you've described.

You’ve just reminded me of a line from one of the Wicca books I read as a teen. The whole coven size <= 13 thing was down to how big teams can get before people tread on each other’s metaphorical feet.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#114

Post by icebraining »

megaman22 wrote: post #80
adekok wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? There is a large difference between competence and ignorance. They're qualitatively different, and different in each field. e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen . Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exagg…

> e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much) More than once it has crossed my mind that it would be worthwhile to build custom error message dialogs that can't be closed for at least 30 seconds (maybe with a secret override) for some areas of our products. The number of t…

Why not just write to an error log? You could even have some button to send it to you or something.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#115

Post by crooked-v »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #57
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."

The senior staff at Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series are a lot like this.

Well, it depends on if you're talking early series or late series. Early series, the wizards were college academia taken to absurdist violent extremes, to the point of assassinating each other to try and get tenure slots. Most of that got quietly dropped over time to make them more likeable.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#116

Post by derefr »

jszymborski wrote: post #12

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) co…

He was talking specifically about the feeling of doing magic, not the feeling of experiencing magic being done. He's interpreting "X feels like magic" as "X feels like being a wizard." Playing a VR game doesn't feel like being a wizard; it just feels like having a spell cast on you.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#117

Post by derefr »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #72

No. The only people that seem to get upset about this is the media, because their power is being usurped by Facebook, and Silicon Valley itself. Go 30 mins outside of the Bay Area and everyone thinks Silicon Valley is great, and programmers work magic. Living in this tech bubble gives a skewed view of the world, but really no one cares.

Even the people whose jobs are being displaced by automation?

Re: Burn the Programmer

#118

Post by anon151516888 »

SilasX wrote: post #83
jimbokun wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do ?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reason…

That's exactly how I felt about Ruby on Rails.

It's also why I prefer more "straightforward" libraries such as Tornado or CherryPy.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#120

Post by ben_w »

ryandrake wrote: post #106
ben_w wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Hah! Now you’ve reminded me how they hated my Ken Burns effect but loved the accidental posterisation from the (RLE) image compressor that was only there because of a severe download size limit and (something something possibly NDA so self-censoring just in case).
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