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What Hacker News says
- If you like that you might also like The Wizardry series by Rick Cook
Here a short description from some bookseller for the first book "The Wiz Biz":
It all began when the wizards of the White League were under attack by their opponents of the Black League and one of their most powerful members cast a spell to bring forth a mighty wizard to aid their cause. What the spell delivered was master hacker Walter Wiz Zumwalt. The wizard who east the spell was dead and nobody—not the elves, not the dwarves, not even the dragons—could figure out what the shanghaied computer nerd was good for. But spells are a lot like computer programs, and, in spite of the Wiz's unprepossessing appearance, he was going to defeat the all-powerful Black League, win the love of a beautiful red-haired witch, and prove that when it comes to spells and sorcery, nobody but nobody can beat a Silicon Valley computer geek!
- The Wiz Biz, by Rick Cook
Silicon Valley programming wiz finds himself transported to a magical world. Spellcraft is archaic and stagnant. What's a curious hacker to do? Bootstrap a new magical 'programming' environment - using Forth, obviously!
Great fun!
- My favorite part of The Magicians series is how complex and real the magic system felt. It was a science just like physics or chemistry. You had to work to get spells right, and creating new spells must have taken many many years of building up abstraction layers and "architecture" so as to allow more complex mechanisms.
Another book that delved into this was "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook. Haven't read the second two books in the series yet, but the cool part was when he realized how by combining certain basic spells, he could create something that was essentially a programming language for magic.
Another one that I started getting into (although the writing style isn't my favorite) is Ra [1]. There magic is just like any other engineering discipline in college.
I'd love recommendations for other books where magic is treated like computer science if people have them.
Back to the topic though--where I work our engineers actually have the official title of "Sorcerers." While I'm not an engineer myself, I consider myself fairly tech savvy and have been teaching myself Ruby and RoR over the past couple years to augment my HTML/CSS/JS knowledge. I still have that sense of wonder when I realize realize all that time I saved by abstracting something away to a single function.
Another book that gave me a similar feeling of awe and humbleness was "Code." It starts with wires and relays and explains how computers work from the ground up. At first it was easy to follow, then I got lost on the combinatorics. Hoping to pick it up again, but it really goes to show how much truly arcane knowledge is required to get us to where we are today. I'd wager most developers out there probably could not assemble a full set of logic gates from a NAND gate if you asked them to. To them, hardware and perhaps even low level systems are, for all intents and purposes, magic.
Then you look at the general population of non-tech-savvy people and while they may take things for granted, devices like cell phones, iPads, etc. are truly magical devices. It's like living in a high-magic D&D campaign setting like Netheril where magic is plentiful and embedded into every aspect of life.
What an amazing time to be alive.
- I am an "early" programmer. I'm on Chapter 7 of Hartl's Rails Tutorial, took a step back to learn Ruby early on and continued. This was all supplementing my knowledge of HTML, CSS and some basic JS.
I recently decided to start the "From NAND to Tetris" Coursera course which led me to starting Petzold's "Code" and then this article comes along.
There are people like my wife who have zero knowledge of coding, and likely won't ever care enough about it to make it through this article (I tried, she didn't get very far). They just have no interest, and I can respect that.
However for people like myself, I've realized that the more layers of the onion I peel back, the more intrigued I become. When I think about it, I was fascinated by fantasy-based magic systems when I was younger. I'm talking things like D&D, Mage: The Ascension, etc. Then I read "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook and realized that I was sucked in at the end when he realized how he could harness the basic "first principles" of this fantasy magic system to build abstractions that allowed for modern day coding principles.
My mind was blown, but I didn't realize just how much at the time.
Harry Potter interested me from the standpoint of "wow, I'd love to learn magic in an academic environment--how cool would that be?" And then I found myself hooked on the Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman which got as deep as I'd ever seen a book get on some of the mechanics of the actual magic system.
Finally, I put two and two together and realized that what appealed to me about all of this was the gradual understanding/building of a complex system based on its simple component parts, and the deep knowledge that was needed to master it. Then I realized that this was why I'm currently geeking out on going under the hood of modern day abstractions and working up from First Principles.
Again, I'm an "early" programmer. I don't fully grok half the crap I read. But I've realized that learning software development on my own is about as close as I'll ever get to working real, modern day magic. Clarke's 3rd law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is very much top of mind lately. The fact that I can twiddle my fingers on a couple buttons and conjure up pictures, video, any information I want, etc. is pure magic.
There are many people out there like me who are amazed by the raw scope of how far we've come, and this article did an amazing job at reminding me of that, even though I may not have been the target audience, and that is why I enjoyed it immensely.
Some people are scared and overwhelmed by complexity, while others seek to understand it and tear it apart. I firmly believe the latter would have much more interest in this article than the former.
- Man do I wish I had something like this to play when I was in high school.
That quote at the beginning of the video is fascinating to me too. With all that is happening around wearable devices, the internet of things, etc., we're not too far away from a future of people gesturing and incanting various things and having their environment respond to them.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (and of course the corollary).
Reminds me of a (somewhat cheesy but fun) fantasy book called The Wiz Biz[1] I read once.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Wiz-Biz-Rick-Cook/dp/0671878468/re...
