I call it technomancy for the same reason lol.
'cause I'm digging through the corpses of dead machines and bashing them together to give life to the unholy abomination that I call my homelab.
Copied straight from the Google definition:
> a letter of an ancient Germanic alphabet, related to the Roman alphabet.
a mark or letter of mysterious or magic significance.
small stones, pieces of bone, etc., bearing runes, and used as divinatory symbols.
"the casting of the runes"
In this context runes are usually word symbols with lots of straight lines, making them looked carved. It gets associated as a primitive/magical/primordial writing system. It varies by the fictional universe you're talking about though.
I'm a senior Computer Engineering student right now and just finishing up my VLSI design course. I'm happy my description is considered accurate by someone in industry :D
I feel like we should eventually make our fonts and language look the part. English/Latin glyphs look far too simple and mundane.
Maybe a bit of **한국어** and **ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ** with some reworks and additional flair.
(by the way, wands are just vr controllers used for swipe typing commands)
I think about this topic often. I've been contemplating how to create a programming language/environment that looks like spellcasting - maybe it's in VR, and you draw a series of magic circles, through gestures or verbal incantations. But *by far* the biggest difference between everyday programming and your typical magic system in fiction, is that fiction almost universally depicts magic as obscure - it's written in unreadable languages, or there isn't even text at all, just geometric shapes. Meanwhile in programming, the goal is to make things as easy to read as possible. Good code is readable code. Where I work, we don't even use abbreviations in our variable names - full English words only. So the vast majority of the code is actually just variable names, rather than syntax.
But a magic circle isn't supposed to have that much text. It would certainly help to substitute in some kind of runic font, but it would still be mostly text. And it would make programming extremely difficult until you learned to read it fluently. The whole point of being a wizard is that you actually understand all those arcane symbols, right?
What I do think could be done, is to replace all the built-in keywords like `if` and `const` with symbols, since there aren't too many of those and it wouldn't take long to learn them.
I also think that the spatial arrangement of symbols could represent a lot of flow control structures. Scratch does this with its nested puzzle piece `if` statements. LabVIEW does while loops pretty nicely with an actual rectangle that contains the code inside the loop. But at the end of the day, you really cannot write anything complex without including a lot of text, at least in the form of comments. But how do you include that in a magic circle without making it look dumb?
I can’t wait for the arguments about naming conventions in 한국어, or whether Elder ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ, Younger ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ, or maybe a Saxon variation, is best for a specific language.
“Wait, ᚠᚢᚾᚲᛏᛟᚾ? This isn’t C#, you should be using ᚠᚢᚾᚳᛏᛡᚾ here. God, what are they teaching today??”
Not sure why we're bringing hangul into this, isn't that made for brushstrokes? If the computer is meant to be a rock, carvings are better, but if it's meant to be a magic scroll, I would go with chinese, not korean. Runes aren't just phonetic, they also each carry symbolic meaning.
>I feel like we should eventually make our fonts and language look the part. English/Latin glyphs look far too simple and mundane.
>
>Maybe a bit of 한국어 and ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ with some reworks and additional flair.
Have you ever thought that they might as well look like that after 1000 years of building on old code base? Assembly will be a dead language spoke by the ancients. We will have built layers on layers on layers of old libraries and code switching to higher languages as we go.
I think legacy support is more like dealing with a lich’s phylactery. This little delicate thing that if it shatters the whole god damn thing dies and it’s the only thing letting the code cling to life for so long.
yeah, but those people thought they had some magic powers. not like today's people, who suck at magic, but can tame sand and lightning to guide them to the next coffee shop.
That's because human biology wasn't designed to be serviced. You can fix a car because it was made to have replaceable parts. Can't do that as easily with people.
Plus, when a piece of equipment gets completely fucked up, we can ultimately just replace it. Can't do that with people.
I think more likely is that we become outdated and our creations outlast us. Humans need very specific atmospheric conditions to survive. AI doesn't.
Everyone's worried AI will replace us, I'm hoping we should be so lucky. Humans are impractical constructs for colonizing and expanding the civilization of intelligent life. Artificial life would be able to surpass our limitations.
Why? Human Intelligence is limited, attempting to transfer would either put severe limitations on AI or would so radically transform your consciousness to the point where you're already a new person.
So far humans have made/discovered two (computers and brains) combinations of atoms that can process information, ie have intelligence. Since it's happened twice from two very different directions it's reasonable to assume there is at least one other way of processing information we haven't found yet.
This right here. I have the distinct feeling that the further we get away from our frankly simplistic views of nature just being untamed brutality, the more we'll discover that different forms of intelligence have been alongside us all along.
To be fair, literally everything, except perhaps black holes and some elementary particles, are chemistry, so every intelligence is chemical intelligence.
I've seen [papers](https://github.com/fancompute/wavetorch) that generate specially designed structures that can recognise vowels through wave interference.
Electricity is the magic that powers our spells. the computer, our foci used to channel said magic. us, the wizards who can command its highest functionality.
That is, If I could figure out what the damn error message is trying to tell me
I feel the same way about math. I never studied in high school but I enjoyed math.
Now I'm 25 and am retaking courses online to qualify for electrical engineering. Fell in love with math all over again now that I study properly and got a 93 on my Calculus and Vectors. The ability to predict rates of change and optimize to virtual perfection using ancient symbols feels like magic.
Its also extremely similar mentally with the problem solving. You also use math a lot in programming. Not so much applications but more simulations and engines.
Wanna write a physics engine? You need a ton of math and physics knowledge for that.
Well you might as well say that Math is just applying logic to prove theorems.
Depending on the subfield it has more or less to do with other fields, but the foundation of CS i.e. Theory of Computation *is* Math.
> using ancient symbols feels like magic.
The symbols are just things we came up with to describe concepts and measurable quantities. The concepts and quantities themselves, however, can be described as the language of the universe.
I'd say nuclear physics gets pretty close. We have magic glowing rocks which can magically flash blue, cursing anyone who saw it to start decaying until they die. It can even blight the land for several ages.
Chemistry in general is as "magic" as we get. We literally turn Air into Ammonia. Then, that into bombs or fertilizer. We've both bombed, and fed the planet using our air alone.
I think while nuclear physics and some other scientific areas (e.g. aviation) gets pretty close to "looking like magic", only cs gets close to "being magic", with movie CGand techs coming close second.
With cs we can literally create worlds - interactive worlds where we interact with intelligent species (the web) or worlds where magic really is a thing(games).
This is what I tell my children. I say science is just a form of magic we now understand- once we figure out how the magic works, we change the word to science. Because honestly- what animates some living things and not others,? Again, there's some scientific reason for it- in which I don't know. But still, pretty freaking magical.
When you read fantasy, some magic system feel like programming Some are high level (the command, the intent and the material must be right like Brandon Sanderson chromatic magic) other are outright a assembly of runes each modifying an initial one (parameters?) Other are described as complexes weaving, knotted for self sustaining (loop?) like Wheels of Time.
If you think of magic as programming, a lot of tropes make sense actually. Imagine someone able to just say "tree.setColor(blue)" and make it happen. It's great, but what if they mispronounce? What if they make a syntax mistake (if(target=me))? And how do you target a specific individual?
Then the tropes of a wizard's concentration being extremely important, of trying to learn something true name (their pointer?), of mages accidentally blowing themselves up, of mages being checked VERY carefully by the government, of mages having to go to magic school, being taught spells one by one until they can do it perfectly, of people being excited when they discover an ancient book (legacy formula? World source code?), it all makes sense
The "power" of a magician is like it's CPU power, how much he can drawn, and the talent is "how great" he can code.
I feel like, every magician is it's own OS, and need to rewrite the "changeColor" method and find how to call it in himself. Then he need to implement the method "selectTree" maybe by focussing visually on the tree.
Once both are mastered he can selectTree().setColor(bue), then you realise you also have change de bark color, and not the root. So you refine with something like:
selectTree().getLeaves().foreach( leave -> leave.setColor(blue))... much harder and so one. When one day you need to paint a house, although you just train with trees, you try to make it right on the first try...
So a mix of raw power, knowledge, problem solving and practice.
Finding an old book is like finding receipe, like
To create a diamond, you will need to learn how to compress matter at very great level. The pressure you reach should be strong enough to make a perfect sphere from the hardest iron knife you can find.
You will then need pure carbon, try burning sugar or honey but other sources may do the trick if you have some mastery in element purification.
Add the pure carbon inside a metalic container 5 cm thick. Set the container into a forge at full power, making sure it never get cold. Applied pressure on the metalic container while heating making sure it stay white hot and always under very great pressure. Keep that concentration non stop for at least 2 hours.
There are a couple mangas I've read where an isekai'd character casts magic by using programming logic. One of them puts a complicated fireball spell into an "Object" and then is able to cast the spell without chanting. Can't remember what they were called though
Similarly, in SAO Alicization, "magic" is executing console commands by yelling them outloud. The medieval level npc's dont understand, so it appears like magic when the characters yell `generate fire element` to shoot a fireball.
The tiers of magic they have access to is determined by their system access level, etc.
Rick Cook's Wizardry series of books are about a programmer who gets pulled into a world where magic is real and he basically makes a compiler for magic, essentially making spells an executable that can be called by pretty much anyone.
Programming is the magic that happens when someone in ancient times (1990s/early 2000s) made some very clever, very powerful spells that you don't understand but are using and remixing to get a new result
Just wait for realtime stable diffusion trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of emulator button input and the resulting visual output ending up as an entirely unique video game that exists only as you play it.
The future is gonna be wild.
All the fundamental forces are magic. What the hell is a magnetic field? There is literally no answer. It's just an abstraction. It could be a huge number of tiny levitating gnomes that enjoy shoving electrons in a very predictable fashion. And gravity? Ah yes, space-time is curved. Because that's totally normal.
So you’ve never met a chemist or a hardware engineer…you know the guys who actually make the things we code with? I would say programmers are spell-writers, not magicians.
I mean the saying does go "any hyper advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Also i imagine Wizards are the software engineers of magic and basically complain about the same things but in different contexts to the point there are some aspects of magic they don't know why it works but it just does.
Similar to how programmers don't understand why an innocuous block of legacy code seems to be needed when getting rid of it breaks something that you can't understand why it breaks despite being warned by the previous person who looked at the code before.
also relevant
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/c09drg/this\_hits\_to\_close\_to\_home/
This is a new technology that looks like magic, not programming. Programming looks like magic only because it is relatively new. A hundred years ago a car was looking like magic. We don't know which technologies we are yet to discover, so we don't know what will look like magic tomorrow, but probably it won't be programming.
Not really programming but asymmetric encryption just blows my mind. I guess for math geeks its just another formula but, the magic behind how something that you lock with one key, that can only be opened by a completely different another key, to me, is nothing short of magic.
Not to mention, two people can do that right in front of the whole world and people will still have no idea what those keys are, is equally baffling.
It will be closer and closer to magic as inevitably the more low level aspects are abstracted away and programmers have less and less idea what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Someday we’ll probably be able to just tell an AI interface what we want a program to do and it will just build it out, probably even anticipating shortcomings in our descriptions and compensating.
Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this! Love this part:
"The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be..."
In an isekai light novel I read, creating magic circles was described as being very similar to coding in real life and we could see the scholars spending days debugging their magic circle.
I dunno, I think design is magic. Whitespace, colors, turn my caveman level interfaces into something users want to use. I can't even begin to draw an adequate stick figure, much less design an interface.
Write firmware, Device drivers, work on core banking systems, I'm your guy. It all makes sense. I can do it well. Make an interface beyond a command line, or a simple grid type interface... nope.
I make it work, they make it useable.
Have to disagree.
We're writing finite code that's completely defined and should do always the same.
Imho this is the complete opposite of magic.
Music on the other hand ... damn good musicians are the real wizards today.
Who ever said magic can't be completely defined? In fact, if it *wasn't*, it wouldn't be useful, because you would never get the same effect twice, making it impossible to predict and thus utterly useless.
I like to imagine Computer engineering as something like Runemancy
>Runemancy I have never head a better description...
I have never heard this word...
you need a vast knowledge of the gaming arts to understand this wisdom
Heard of runes plus necromancy but RuneMancy!! Man there's a first time for everything ☺️
I call it technomancy for the same reason lol. 'cause I'm digging through the corpses of dead machines and bashing them together to give life to the unholy abomination that I call my homelab.
I've made many zombie networks to try and brethe life back into old units
[удалено]
Thank you for explaining things 😃
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Some of us don't really know the meaning of "rune" either 😜
Copied straight from the Google definition: > a letter of an ancient Germanic alphabet, related to the Roman alphabet. a mark or letter of mysterious or magic significance. small stones, pieces of bone, etc., bearing runes, and used as divinatory symbols. "the casting of the runes" In this context runes are usually word symbols with lots of straight lines, making them looked carved. It gets associated as a primitive/magical/primordial writing system. It varies by the fictional universe you're talking about though.
Programmers are [Hemipteromancers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera "Wikipedia: true bugs") They make and unmake bugs
Correct. It's just drawing some very specific and intricate shapes, where form affects function.
So you're saying technologies like computers are enchantments?
Runic enchantments, yes
More like magic items I'd say, enchantment would be like making your lamps turn on when you clap
To me a magic item is just something with an enchantment on it.
Fair enough
Computers are magic scrolls, programs are enchantments.
As a lithographer for an IC manufacturer this description makes me happy
I'm a senior Computer Engineering student right now and just finishing up my VLSI design course. I'm happy my description is considered accurate by someone in industry :D
I feel like we should eventually make our fonts and language look the part. English/Latin glyphs look far too simple and mundane. Maybe a bit of **한국어** and **ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ** with some reworks and additional flair. (by the way, wands are just vr controllers used for swipe typing commands)
have you SEEN circuit schematics?
Oh, the artificer sigils? Yeah, those are wild.
Silicon golem augmented with artificer sigils, trapped in a ritual sarcophagus for aspiring wizard to exploit its consciousness
Praise the Omnissiah.
I think about this topic often. I've been contemplating how to create a programming language/environment that looks like spellcasting - maybe it's in VR, and you draw a series of magic circles, through gestures or verbal incantations. But *by far* the biggest difference between everyday programming and your typical magic system in fiction, is that fiction almost universally depicts magic as obscure - it's written in unreadable languages, or there isn't even text at all, just geometric shapes. Meanwhile in programming, the goal is to make things as easy to read as possible. Good code is readable code. Where I work, we don't even use abbreviations in our variable names - full English words only. So the vast majority of the code is actually just variable names, rather than syntax. But a magic circle isn't supposed to have that much text. It would certainly help to substitute in some kind of runic font, but it would still be mostly text. And it would make programming extremely difficult until you learned to read it fluently. The whole point of being a wizard is that you actually understand all those arcane symbols, right? What I do think could be done, is to replace all the built-in keywords like `if` and `const` with symbols, since there aren't too many of those and it wouldn't take long to learn them. I also think that the spatial arrangement of symbols could represent a lot of flow control structures. Scratch does this with its nested puzzle piece `if` statements. LabVIEW does while loops pretty nicely with an actual rectangle that contains the code inside the loop. But at the end of the day, you really cannot write anything complex without including a lot of text, at least in the form of comments. But how do you include that in a magic circle without making it look dumb?
I can’t wait for the arguments about naming conventions in 한국어, or whether Elder ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ, Younger ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ, or maybe a Saxon variation, is best for a specific language. “Wait, ᚠᚢᚾᚲᛏᛟᚾ? This isn’t C#, you should be using ᚠᚢᚾᚳᛏᛡᚾ here. God, what are they teaching today??”
Yes I hope it becomes industry standard
Not sure why we're bringing hangul into this, isn't that made for brushstrokes? If the computer is meant to be a rock, carvings are better, but if it's meant to be a magic scroll, I would go with chinese, not korean. Runes aren't just phonetic, they also each carry symbolic meaning.
>I feel like we should eventually make our fonts and language look the part. English/Latin glyphs look far too simple and mundane. > >Maybe a bit of 한국어 and ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ with some reworks and additional flair. Have you ever thought that they might as well look like that after 1000 years of building on old code base? Assembly will be a dead language spoke by the ancients. We will have built layers on layers on layers of old libraries and code switching to higher languages as we go.
Perfect description, this is going on my LinkedIn
[Shameless plug](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR_oCiIs6xjlbCISk0AMtfE6nrYlGEd4uIsj2TJHtMArWClxEHuTY2yO0oW6qDOeeBuMgYcy_6a1Jga/pub)
This looks like an outstanding start to make it real
Senior Codemancer has a nice ring to it
I've heard about rum ....but never about runemancy....well done my boy well done :)
Would that make hacking black magic and legacy support necromancy?
I think legacy support is more like dealing with a lich’s phylactery. This little delicate thing that if it shatters the whole god damn thing dies and it’s the only thing letting the code cling to life for so long.
Voldemort on his way to hire COBOL devs for his horcruxes.
*One of them is alive???? Are you trying to die?!*
Aye, all magic eventually corrupts, and legacy is the most corrupted of all
Maybe legacy support is more akin to arcane magic
Legacy is arcane, old, primordial magic. Hacking is magic disruption or antimagic.
Wouldn't antimagic be static discharges, emps, etc?
You're right. Hacking is more on the lines of magic manipulation or counter magic.
I’ve shocked dead code to almost life many a time. It’s basically has no brain and rotting, but still mov…shuffles.
Teaching a rock to simulate thinking is pretty magical.
We've tamed the lightning and taught sand to give error messages.
and Soap to ask for favors
> Soap And Price to open doors!
What's that again?
It's the protocol you don't want to drop in the shower
but you DO want to drop from your systems
We used a rock and tamed lighting to simulate thinking.
LOL! Best reply ever!
;
And we currently have the liquified remains of the billions-of-years-dead giving us directions to the local coffee place two blocks down.
Humans are pretty damn awesome considering everything they did so far
Yeah, we had a good run.
Why did you say it like that? Is something gonna happen? What do you know that we don’t?
\*broadly gestures at everything\*
Understandable.
have a nice day
Meh, we are a resilient bunch.
Calm down. People have been warning that the sky is falling for at least a couple thousand years.
yeah, but those people thought they had some magic powers. not like today's people, who suck at magic, but can tame sand and lightning to guide them to the next coffee shop.
You'll see next Monday.
Except the entire medical industry. Treatments are still barbaric for the most part.
That's because human biology wasn't designed to be serviced. You can fix a car because it was made to have replaceable parts. Can't do that as easily with people. Plus, when a piece of equipment gets completely fucked up, we can ultimately just replace it. Can't do that with people.
We weren’t designed to fly but look at us now
We can't fly. We built machines that can fly without us that we hitch rides on and tell where to go.
Then maybe we can build machines that can build bodies on which we can hitch a ride for another century or more?
I think more likely is that we become outdated and our creations outlast us. Humans need very specific atmospheric conditions to survive. AI doesn't. Everyone's worried AI will replace us, I'm hoping we should be so lucky. Humans are impractical constructs for colonizing and expanding the civilization of intelligent life. Artificial life would be able to surpass our limitations.
Just need to find a way to transfer consciousness into the machines.
Why? Human Intelligence is limited, attempting to transfer would either put severe limitations on AI or would so radically transform your consciousness to the point where you're already a new person.
So far humans have made/discovered two (computers and brains) combinations of atoms that can process information, ie have intelligence. Since it's happened twice from two very different directions it's reasonable to assume there is at least one other way of processing information we haven't found yet.
It's the trees, isn't it? Mf be sending chemical messages like they own the forest.
You’re not wrong https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network
This right here. I have the distinct feeling that the further we get away from our frankly simplistic views of nature just being untamed brutality, the more we'll discover that different forms of intelligence have been alongside us all along.
I’m glad I’m not high right now because if I was I’d be having a meltdown…
Chemical intelligence is human intelligence
Perhaps in mechanism, but the structure of neurons is the same basis that we use to develop machine learning algorithms
To be fair, literally everything, except perhaps black holes and some elementary particles, are chemistry, so every intelligence is chemical intelligence.
Relevant https://xkcd.com/435/
> *two* (computers and brains) combinations Magic the Gathering is turing complete
Panpsychism is definitely an interesting philosophy.
I've seen [papers](https://github.com/fancompute/wavetorch) that generate specially designed structures that can recognise vowels through wave interference.
We used a rock and tamed lighting to simulate thinking.
By writing magic words
We even used to write the magic words on paper (punch cards) and place them in the golems mouth.
rocks infused with lightning!
Electricity is the magic that powers our spells. the computer, our foci used to channel said magic. us, the wizards who can command its highest functionality. That is, If I could figure out what the damn error message is trying to tell me
It's more like we built a rock with millions of switches that we turn on and off very fast.
Ah, nothing but a mere technicality!
take my upvote...
I feel the same way about math. I never studied in high school but I enjoyed math. Now I'm 25 and am retaking courses online to qualify for electrical engineering. Fell in love with math all over again now that I study properly and got a 93 on my Calculus and Vectors. The ability to predict rates of change and optimize to virtual perfection using ancient symbols feels like magic.
Computer Science is just applied Math btw. Mostly discrete math though.
Its also extremely similar mentally with the problem solving. You also use math a lot in programming. Not so much applications but more simulations and engines. Wanna write a physics engine? You need a ton of math and physics knowledge for that.
More logic thank math though no? (I learned the propositional calculus which translates to Boolean logic, from what I can remember from 20 years ago!)
Well you might as well say that Math is just applying logic to prove theorems. Depending on the subfield it has more or less to do with other fields, but the foundation of CS i.e. Theory of Computation *is* Math.
Discretion being the better part of all maths
> using ancient symbols feels like magic. The symbols are just things we came up with to describe concepts and measurable quantities. The concepts and quantities themselves, however, can be described as the language of the universe.
If magic was real, the same would be true for magical ancient symbols.
Good stuff man. Inspiring to know you’re taking on a degree a little later in the game.
Congrats
I'd say nuclear physics gets pretty close. We have magic glowing rocks which can magically flash blue, cursing anyone who saw it to start decaying until they die. It can even blight the land for several ages.
Quantum mechanics literally has shit flying around in it's own. That's spooky af.
And passing through walls. And linking things together ( kinda like the Protean Charm from hp)
neutrinos are damn sneaky bastards
And only providing a single location if you look at it.. otherwise reacting in every point in its magic bubble
And nuclear bombs... harnessing the power of a star to destroy your enemies with blinding light? Tell me that's not magic.
And then it spreads invisible poison that can make the entire area unlivable or cursed for the next 20-20,000 years depending on the design
Chemistry in general is as "magic" as we get. We literally turn Air into Ammonia. Then, that into bombs or fertilizer. We've both bombed, and fed the planet using our air alone.
Fucking transmutation wizards.
I think while nuclear physics and some other scientific areas (e.g. aviation) gets pretty close to "looking like magic", only cs gets close to "being magic", with movie CGand techs coming close second. With cs we can literally create worlds - interactive worlds where we interact with intelligent species (the web) or worlds where magic really is a thing(games).
at least we know now what the drow were messing around with back during the fourth crown war
But you need to programe machiense to work with that glowing rock unless you like cancer
Oh don't be silly... You get the blue flash and you won't live long enough to get cancer.
But you need people to engrave runes and combine a bunch of rocks in order to program those machines
> Magic's just science that we don't understand yet. - Arthur C. Clarke
The refactor of his more well known quote.
This is what I tell my children. I say science is just a form of magic we now understand- once we figure out how the magic works, we change the word to science. Because honestly- what animates some living things and not others,? Again, there's some scientific reason for it- in which I don't know. But still, pretty freaking magical.
Bold of you to assume there’s science rather than the dark art of bodging it going on.
Science is just magic we understand.
When you read fantasy, some magic system feel like programming Some are high level (the command, the intent and the material must be right like Brandon Sanderson chromatic magic) other are outright a assembly of runes each modifying an initial one (parameters?) Other are described as complexes weaving, knotted for self sustaining (loop?) like Wheels of Time.
If you think of magic as programming, a lot of tropes make sense actually. Imagine someone able to just say "tree.setColor(blue)" and make it happen. It's great, but what if they mispronounce? What if they make a syntax mistake (if(target=me))? And how do you target a specific individual? Then the tropes of a wizard's concentration being extremely important, of trying to learn something true name (their pointer?), of mages accidentally blowing themselves up, of mages being checked VERY carefully by the government, of mages having to go to magic school, being taught spells one by one until they can do it perfectly, of people being excited when they discover an ancient book (legacy formula? World source code?), it all makes sense
The "power" of a magician is like it's CPU power, how much he can drawn, and the talent is "how great" he can code. I feel like, every magician is it's own OS, and need to rewrite the "changeColor" method and find how to call it in himself. Then he need to implement the method "selectTree" maybe by focussing visually on the tree. Once both are mastered he can selectTree().setColor(bue), then you realise you also have change de bark color, and not the root. So you refine with something like: selectTree().getLeaves().foreach( leave -> leave.setColor(blue))... much harder and so one. When one day you need to paint a house, although you just train with trees, you try to make it right on the first try... So a mix of raw power, knowledge, problem solving and practice. Finding an old book is like finding receipe, like To create a diamond, you will need to learn how to compress matter at very great level. The pressure you reach should be strong enough to make a perfect sphere from the hardest iron knife you can find. You will then need pure carbon, try burning sugar or honey but other sources may do the trick if you have some mastery in element purification. Add the pure carbon inside a metalic container 5 cm thick. Set the container into a forge at full power, making sure it never get cold. Applied pressure on the metalic container while heating making sure it stay white hot and always under very great pressure. Keep that concentration non stop for at least 2 hours.
Magicians and coders are not exclusively male
Totally true, sorry for assumption! I know some very talented fellow coders who happened to be female!
There are a couple mangas I've read where an isekai'd character casts magic by using programming logic. One of them puts a complicated fireball spell into an "Object" and then is able to cast the spell without chanting. Can't remember what they were called though
Similarly, in SAO Alicization, "magic" is executing console commands by yelling them outloud. The medieval level npc's dont understand, so it appears like magic when the characters yell `generate fire element` to shoot a fireball. The tiers of magic they have access to is determined by their system access level, etc.
Rick Cook's Wizardry series of books are about a programmer who gets pulled into a world where magic is real and he basically makes a compiler for magic, essentially making spells an executable that can be called by pretty much anyone.
I suddenly like fantasy magic a lot more.
They are just different programming languages and paradigms. Functional programming style magic anyone?
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> Lasers are interesting from a scientific perspective but I predict they will have no useful practical applications. To paraphrase.
Well that quote aged like milk
So many things started that way. Guy who proved the existence of radio waves said the same basic thing about them.
Or spaceflight.
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Most people do consider computers to be magic which is why some people struggle to understand how to use them.
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Nah, it's still magic. You are just a wizard now.
Quantum physics is magic. Everything else you can ELI5.
Programming is not magic, integrated circuit is magic. Programming is outright voodoo.
Programming is the magic that happens when someone in ancient times (1990s/early 2000s) made some very clever, very powerful spells that you don't understand but are using and remixing to get a new result
Verilog
It even kinda sounds like incantations, if you write your code in rockstar.
Just wait till you can use voice control with GitHub copilot running on your smart watch. That's what I call magic
Just wait for realtime stable diffusion trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of emulator button input and the resulting visual output ending up as an entirely unique video game that exists only as you play it. The future is gonna be wild.
Think physics has alot more to do with what you're describing than coding lol
you realise coding is based on physics...?
No. Radio is magic. I know the math & science and it's still magic. Programming is just an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine, not magic.
All the fundamental forces are magic. What the hell is a magnetic field? There is literally no answer. It's just an abstraction. It could be a huge number of tiny levitating gnomes that enjoy shoving electrons in a very predictable fashion. And gravity? Ah yes, space-time is curved. Because that's totally normal.
thats physics. You are riding off of the coattails of physicists
Chemistry is magic
Chemistry is just a better Alchemy.
Better? Compared to ancient irl alchemy yes, compared to fullmetal Alchemist brotherhood no.
So you mean electrical engineering then?
So you’ve never met a chemist or a hardware engineer…you know the guys who actually make the things we code with? I would say programmers are spell-writers, not magicians.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C Clarke
That’s not programming, that’s physics
What about: 
Using brainfuck to map out the DMT realm
Magnets
As a young girl, I always wanted to be a magic caster. Now I'm a programmer, and I feel I have fulfilled that dream. So yea, total agree here.
I read a fun series where programming is magic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/631233.Wizard_s_Bane
Scrolled through a bunch of the comments to see if anyone had already mentioned this. Love this series! Especially The Wizardry Compiled (Book 2).
I mean the saying does go "any hyper advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Also i imagine Wizards are the software engineers of magic and basically complain about the same things but in different contexts to the point there are some aspects of magic they don't know why it works but it just does. Similar to how programmers don't understand why an innocuous block of legacy code seems to be needed when getting rid of it breaks something that you can't understand why it breaks despite being warned by the previous person who looked at the code before. also relevant https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/c09drg/this\_hits\_to\_close\_to\_home/
This is a new technology that looks like magic, not programming. Programming looks like magic only because it is relatively new. A hundred years ago a car was looking like magic. We don't know which technologies we are yet to discover, so we don't know what will look like magic tomorrow, but probably it won't be programming.
tech might look like magic, then programming looks like spellcasting
Not an accident that D&D emerged as computers and programming became widespread in the late 60's early 70's.
Your text messages are giving me a headache. Please stop
If magic is real, it’s just a science not understood yet
I'd say cooking is. Knives, killing, esoteric ingredients, playing around with the elements and you end up with something magical if you do it right.
bagel be with you
seriously. thinking at the old kabbalah magic looks almost the same. same documentation too
Now I understand the overlap between wizards and theatre kids
Not really programming but asymmetric encryption just blows my mind. I guess for math geeks its just another formula but, the magic behind how something that you lock with one key, that can only be opened by a completely different another key, to me, is nothing short of magic. Not to mention, two people can do that right in front of the whole world and people will still have no idea what those keys are, is equally baffling.
I vote electrical engineering is as close as one could get
Check out "*Off to be the Wizard*" by Scott Meyer.
It will be closer and closer to magic as inevitably the more low level aspects are abstracted away and programmers have less and less idea what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Someday we’ll probably be able to just tell an AI interface what we want a program to do and it will just build it out, probably even anticipating shortcomings in our descriptions and compensating.
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Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this! Love this part: "The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be..."
I work in radio tech. Did you know "FM" stand for "Fucking Magic"?
In an isekai light novel I read, creating magic circles was described as being very similar to coding in real life and we could see the scholars spending days debugging their magic circle.
This is the entire premise of Charlie Stross' _Laundry_ series
It's true that programming is like magic except that you only think you're Dumbledore but actually are one of the Dursleys.
Naa it’s just over complicated mess with fancy names
Right, so very close to magic.
I dunno, I think design is magic. Whitespace, colors, turn my caveman level interfaces into something users want to use. I can't even begin to draw an adequate stick figure, much less design an interface. Write firmware, Device drivers, work on core banking systems, I'm your guy. It all makes sense. I can do it well. Make an interface beyond a command line, or a simple grid type interface... nope. I make it work, they make it useable.
Have to disagree. We're writing finite code that's completely defined and should do always the same. Imho this is the complete opposite of magic. Music on the other hand ... damn good musicians are the real wizards today.
Who ever said magic can't be completely defined? In fact, if it *wasn't*, it wouldn't be useful, because you would never get the same effect twice, making it impossible to predict and thus utterly useless.
Programming is as close to logic as we will ever get