Hello everyone, today I was reading SICP, and the similarity between magic and computer science struck me. Just as a magician can weld great power by speaking the language the of gods to bring down fire and lightning, we programmers can herd thousands and millions like slaves with the right lines of codes. Such power to be weld solely through intellect exist nowhere else. With the right lines of codes, we can cripple nations and conquer the world. Such magnificent power, I must read more SICP.
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Anonymous2008-07-20 2:51
READ SICP
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Anonymous2008-07-20 2:57
As the world slowly digitized, computer science is perhaps the closest incarnation to magic. We can wreak chaos and havoc through intellect alone. Think what a virus that flash a BIOS firmware can do. Yes, we computer programmer are shepherd of the new age. We can speak the language of the thinking machines, we alone possess the sole dominion these creatures of infinite power, like dragons.
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Anonymous2008-07-20 4:15
Magic.
In Science, most people actually have a clue, which is clearly not happening. People model and study reality, while here we define how it is.
Art is one of the proper tasks of life, and in a way, when we express ourselves in a creative way, we're artists. For example, from the Linux kernel, fs/ufs/ufs_super.c: printk("ufs_read_super: fucking Sun blows me\n"); However, it's hard to argue programming is much of an art. Most of your expressions are about "This piece of shit won't work", "I hate my stupid magazine-reading Java-ass-licking boss", or "I'll make it work this way, fuck the morons who don't like it".
No engineering discipline will ever tolerate the "let's just try it lol" or "I don't understand why this hack works but who cares" culture. fprintf(stderr, "***In SomeFunction, i=%d j=%d lolololol it happened I told you***\n", i, j) is not the usual way an engineer works. Yet engineering is probably what programming has the most in common: rational design of complex systems (even if we nigger rig most of them).
But I'm choosing magic, because there are many wonderful things we can do in this business no scientists, artists or engineers can dream of doing. For example, the fact that we can always go back to the previous state. We can try anything with no repercussions other than wasting time. We can clone identical environments. We can simulate things. We can build infinitely complex systems through abstraction, aggregation and iteration, with the only limitation of available storage space and execution time. And we don't need to have the big picture in our minds; in fact the big picture it may not fit any man's mind.
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Anonymous2008-07-20 4:21
>>5
So, like any good wizard, we document our masterful spells in spellbooks. They include the ingrediens (source code) and some reasoning and directions so we can remember WTF ritual we were going through when created this artifact We take our favorite sacrament, and build languages and worlds inside the bits and bytes being processed by our Von Nuemann machines.
>>3 Yes, we computer programmer are shepherd of the new age. We can speak the language of the thinking machines, we alone possess the sole dominion these creatures of infinite power, like dragons.
Hey Anonymous, did you finish that PHP Web2.0 application for our client already? I don't pay you $5 an hour for posting on /prog/.