
What Kind of Sorcery Is This? Why code is so often compared to magic - w1ntermute
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/the-magic-of-code/478794/?single_page=true
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shostack
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.

[1] [https://qntm.org/ra](https://qntm.org/ra)

