I think of magic as the fantasy of relating to the world around you in the same way as to your own subconscious. This has obvious appeal -- by System 2 standards, your System 1 is a super-powered genie -- and lots of story potential from the familiar difficulty and cross-purposes of that interface. But we need more of the Alan Kay-ish notion of augmenting your System 2 abilities instead (if I have his philosophy roughly right) -- 'magic' in the service of clear thinking instead of mysticism. Environments that invite you to dig into any part that puzzles or frustrates you, figure out the problem, change it. We shouldn't accept the black box so readily.
Burn the Programmer
181–190 of 254 posts
Re: Burn the Programmer
#182Considering 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…
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…
This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion.
It's interesting you took the time to post this. As the sibling to this comment indicate, there's a lot of 'magic' in many languages and frameworks. not just Spring. You don't off an example of a tech stack you do favor so one can only guess.
I will say that when I have encountered developers and teams who also disdain otherwise popular frameworks, they sometimes choose to roll their own instead of buckling down and learning said framework. Invariably they end up with a partial implementation of what they didn't understand, that is bug ridden, ill performing, and just plain bad.
There's a lot of good stuff in Spring (and EJB, and rails, and ...) the onus is on us, as professionals to learn it and use it where and when it's appropriate.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. I assume I am not the only one who destroyed at least some amount of his personal data doing computer magic [1]. This would be analogous to a spell going wrong, burning the witches' hand or something similar. [1] Be it an incorrect incantation of rm, or just a poorly aimed flick with the pixie pointer.
I am showing my age here. I destroyed a CRT monitor once when I used the wrong incantation for xorg.
I remember that thunk.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#184(Fun fact: horror games are more intense in VR, by some margin. So terrifying, in fact, that I added a "Low Terror Mode" recently, after reading a significant number of people saying "I'd love to play your game, but I absolutely won't, because it sounds way too scary.")
While I would love to play the full terror mode, the low terror mode made me think of a game that replaced the undead horrors you summon with giant puppies that lick your foes until they lose all feelings of anger. A silly idea, to be sure, but it would be fun to play if the theme was expanded on just to see the insanity, and that's the stuff cult (in the media sense...) followings talk about decades later.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#185I teach high school math and science, and I fully recognize that most of my students will not end up in math and science-focused careers. So I think pretty carefully about my goals for these students. One clear purpose in everything I ask students to do: take away the sense of "magic" in technological things. I just finished teaching a math class, where the final project was a 3d modeling exercise. Students didn't al…
This is a great point. I think it is tempting and understandable to, at times, appreciate the "magic" of our profession, but our goal should be able to take away that sense of magic - both in terms of creating programming languages and tools which are more intuitive for human beings, and, as OP says, in terms of education.
There will always be some magic in programming. Unnecessary magic, imho, is just another form of obfuscation.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#186Earlier 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…
> it's far from rationalist fiction Is that bad? Like any didactic subtype of the genre, rationalist fiction often struggles to succeed in both of the goals set for it; the only example I've as yet found enjoyable - and extremely so! I strongly recommend it - is Unsong by Scott Alexander, also of Slate Star Codex.
Not purely rational you have parahumans where most protagonists' acts have some logic behind it. Not a lot of evil people just because they're evil, and not a lot of pure heroes either.
https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ if you want something to read for next month(s).
Re: Burn the Programmer
#187Considering 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…
If you like this kind of stories and don't mind a work in progress you whould try https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/61ya08/oh_this_has_not... where a nerd ends up in a fantasy world.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#188It 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."
Do you really want a ritual to summon sex crazed beings? You may want to be a little more specific there.
Djinns are the BOFH of the magic world.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In the Quantum Thief (actually one of its sequels) by Hannu Rajaniemi, there are Secret Names that perform magic; one of them was 'Emergency Decompression Protection' and produced a shield around the incanter.
Smartcoral's user interface is also pretty similar, though, and that shows up in Quantum Thief proper. :)
Re: Burn the Programmer
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. I assume I am not the only one who destroyed at least some amount of his personal data doing computer magic [1]. This would be analogous to a spell going wrong, burning the witches' hand or something similar. [1] Be it an incorrect incantation of rm, or just a poorly aimed flick with the pixie pointer.
I am showing my age here. I destroyed a CRT monitor once when I used the wrong incantation for xorg.
Whoa, what? I'd be curious to hear more about that... How could some software config harm a display? Incorrect sync rates or something? ...and yeah, I am old enough to have used CRT displays for many years of my life, just never seen one get damaged like that! :)