
Burn the Programmer - thenomad
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/11/burn-the-programmer.html
======
japhyr
I 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 always enjoy the process, but they were
deeply satisfied with their work in the end. Most of them will never model
anything again in their lives. But we've removed the idea that when they see
an amazingly detailed 3d-printed prosthetic limb, that the designer was doing
some kind of magic. They know that the designer worked from the same
principles they learned, the only real difference is that the designer enjoyed
this work enough to stay with it and become highly proficient at it.

These are all students who will not want to burn programmers, but who will
instead understand the hard work that goes into well-designed apps and
products. They will also know that people who design crappy or harmful
products can do much better and much different work.

~~~
3pt14159
Someone whose name I no longer remember was a teacher of mine in highschool.
Even though I knew how to program and had a nights / summers / weekends job
programming I treated the CPU / motherboard as "magic". As if there was this
dividing wall between the pure mathematical construct of a software program
and the physicality of the bits moving through the motherboard.

The teacher taught us how to use NPN and PNP transistors to create very simple
calculators.

Though I never went into hardware, that small demonstration was enough for me
to see through the illusion and made it clear to me that the world was
generally understandable if you just put in the time.

Even scary magical things like CPUs.

~~~
flor1s
I used to think the same way about the CPU, even after getting a masters in
Computer Science! About a year ago I read the book Code by Charles Petzold and
watched some lectures about Computer Science by Robert Sedgewick which really
opened up my mind.

~~~
ignoramous
Are those lectures in the public domain? If so, could you pls link to them?
Thx.

~~~
flor1s
In the case of the Computer Science course from Sedgwick, I have only been
able to find it on Safari Books and InformIT (30$)
[http://www.informit.com/title/9780134493831](http://www.informit.com/title/9780134493831)

If you happen to be a member of ACM, you actually get free access to Safari
Books through [http://learning.acm.org](http://learning.acm.org)

------
stryan
Considering 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 looking a bit more into "programming
as magic" there's a great book series called The Wizardry series about
programmers being transported into a fantasy realm where magic works similarly
to a programming language. The main character ends up writing a compiler based
off (IIRC) APL and revolutionizes magic. The first book is called Wizard's
Bane and it's light and fun reading.

~~~
jimbokun
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 reasoning about the code as difficult as possible.

~~~
SilasX
That's exactly how I felt about Ruby on Rails.

~~~
anon151516888
It's also why I prefer more "straightforward" libraries such as Tornado or
CherryPy.

~~~
SilasX
Wait, that's contrasting to other Python libraries that use the Rails/Spring
magic? Which ones?

~~~
falcor84
Django for example has a lot of magic.

A lot of the development process consists of adding fields with particular
names to classes that have a long inheritance chain of their own, and it's not
trivial at all to understand what all of your options are and how they work
behind the scenes.

~~~
SilasX
Hm I figured Django may be guilty of that. FWIW I learned web apps on RoR but
my first job was Django. Django (or at least, apps in practice) was
_definitely_ less magic than Rails, although I see what you mean about a lot
of the config being less transparent than one might like. I always have to eg
hit SO to figure out how to add something to the admin since the model for how
it works is not transparent.

I’ll definitely check out Tornado and the others for how they compare.

------
b0rsuk
Another analogy that I can't shake off is True Name and search engines.

Since the dawn of time folk tales placed emphasis on true name of people and
objects. Knowing the true name grants one power over something or someone.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name)

Knowing the true name of someone lets you put it in a search engine and find
out about him/her. There are some sleazy smartphone apps which let you do even
more. Knowing the name of the problem lets you search for the algorithm.
Certain problems become trivial if you can name them and find an already known
solution.

~~~
Asooka
"True Name" is what I'm reminded of most when I try to invoke tech support.
Recently my ISP upgraded me to fiber and gave me a ... router. I would put
some adjectives there, but I want to keep this post civil. Needless to say, I
want to do some more advanced things with this device like enable restricted
UPnP, maybe run some DNS-level ad blockers, port forward, etc. After some
arguing with tech support I couldn't get them to divulge the password and
other administration details, so I gave up and set up my own router right
after it to do at least some of the things I want.

Recently however, I saw an offhand comment in a thread about this ISP, where
the person mentioned the words "please bridge port 1 on my router". Well that
sounds like exactly the thing I would want, but didn't think to ask for and
the tech support person didn't think to offer me. Sure enough, as soon as I
spoke the magic words to tech support, the router became a bridge and my own
device is acting as the gateway.

The big difference between tech support and programming is that programming
usually comes with a manual, while with tech support, you have to learn the
True Names of the actions you want performed from some wise master who heard
them from some other wise master, who... and so on.

~~~
contingencies
_The big difference between tech support and programming is that programming
usually comes with a manual, while with tech support, you have to learn the
True Names of the actions you want performed from some wise master who heard
them from some other wise master, who... and so on._

Actually this is true of most bureaucracies: banks, governments, large
companies, academia, etc.

------
j2kun
It 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."

~~~
AndrewDucker
The senior staff at Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series are a
lot like this.

~~~
crooked-v
Well, it depends on if you're talking early series or late series. Early
series, the wizards were college academia taken to absurdist violent extremes,
to the point of assassinating each other to try and get tenure slots. Most of
that got quietly dropped over time to make them more likeable.

~~~
mcguire
...that's an option?

(Ex-academic here.)

~~~
jon_richards
Trust me, you don't want to go down that path. Spend all that time memorizing
some complicated spell, use it once, and _poof_ , you've completely forgotten
it.

------
marsrover
You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really
wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other
profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical
engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical.

I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.

~~~
everyone
I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career
though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or
metalworker.

We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build
it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity
with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop
completely novel things or masterworks. Sometimes many of us will be
commissioned together to build something really big or challenging.

~~~
mbrock
I think the craft aspect is somewhat romanticized and that much of programming
work is more like a kind of accounting or some other clerical bureaucratic
trade.

~~~
LyndsySimon
In my experience, that depends entirely on your role.

I've found that my place is within a team of 5<x<20 - it's large enough that I
can work on "meta" stuff like workflow improvements and refactoring existing
functionality to make it generically applicable where appropriate, but small
enough that my contributions are not lost in the noise and I can see the
impact I'm having on the team's overall velocity.

If all I were doing every day was implementing yet another CRUD form, then I
would feel the same way you've described.

~~~
ben_w
You’ve just reminded me of a line from one of the Wicca books I read as a
teen. The whole coven size <= 13 thing was down to how big teams can get
before people tread on each other’s metaphorical feet.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Covens of >13 are dealt with a great deal in Sterling's "Emberverse" series...

------
fermigier
"...Ever tried to set up a Postfix server?" is the new "...Ever tried to set
up a Sendmail server?".

(When I was younger, I was told by a veteran sysadmin that only 5 persons in
the world knew how to configure Sendmail directly, everyone else was relying
on preprocessing scripts written by the aforementioned wizards).

Edit: my point is that Postfix is actually quite easy to configure, compared
to Sendmail which was the standard in the 90s.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Is it? I've only modified existing configurations, but Postfix doesn't seem
bad.

~~~
dsr_
Postfix is quite simple, provided you already know how MTAs work and can
google the right terms.

Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation.

Hah; I had to look at a sendmail config a while back for a legacy server. It's
line noise.

------
iRideUnicornz
This is a really well-written article. It's clear, concise and sticks to the
point, not drowning the reader in anecdotes and unrelated analogies. I've
thought these same thoughts myself when explaining automation and how it would
affect their lives to my parents, and was met with mostly indifference not
because they were stubborn but because they simply couldn't wrap their heads
around the idea that a computer (which, when they were growing up as teens,
weren't even capable of doing things like e-mails) could ever fully replace
them, people who studied for years to master and certify their respective
jobs. This article describes that experience in a truly creative and
interesting way.

------
robto
This puts me in mind of Aphyr's series on a powerful wizard interviewing in
the valley:

[https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-
intervie...](https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview)

[https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-
interview](https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview)

[https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-
interview](https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview)

I think there are wizards but I'm not one of them.

------
weeksie
It's definitely an old metaphor. SICP is the "Wizard Book" after all, and IIRC
they even used the term "incantations" to describe commands and programming
constructs at some points, though it's been well over a decade since I've
leafed through it.

~~~
heptathorp
We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

------
coldcode
I've never seen wizards in fantasy novels have to deal with myriads of JIRA
tickets, attend interminable mind-numbing meetings and solve impossible
dependency hells. I guess that's why they call it fantasy.

~~~
kybernetikos
Bob Howard in the Laundry series by Charles Stross is a wizard who has started
out in IT and who does have to go to interminable powerpoint meetings and work
through lots of hideous beaurocracy.

------
jszymborski
I find it at the very least a little ironic that the author used consumer
technology to simulate magic abilities (to such an immersive state that he had
to put a low-horror mode) and uses his success in this department as an
argument that consumer technology doesn't very closely convey the feeling of
magic.

I appreciate the argument being made, but I can't say that I accept the
premise that (sufficiently advanced) consumer technology is often unlike
magic.

Hell, just sending out an invisible beam of light towards a magic black box so
that it can remotely open up a window to a lands that may or may not exist is
an awfully cool reality to hide behind the rather normal sounding acronym
"TV", and that's hardly cutting edge technology.

~~~
derefr
He was talking specifically about the feeling of _doing_ magic, not the
feeling of _experiencing_ magic being done. He's interpreting "X feels like
magic" as "X feels like being a wizard." Playing a VR game doesn't feel like
being a wizard; it just feels like having a spell cast on you.

------
throwanem
Getting hit pretty hard. To very briefly summarize, the article reviews an
occasional trope in writing about our field, namely that it has some
interesting correspondences with old-style conceptions of magic - from
hermitical study of certain esoterica granting access to powers and
principalities beyond the ordinary ken, through potentially hostile reaction
to same among those lacking such secret knowledge and frightened by the
prospect of a world increasingly founded on it, to "do not call up what you
cannot put down" in the context of modern AI and ML research and the
applications thereof.

~~~
cstross
My server (where this guest article is hosted) is fielding some 20 HTTP GET
requests/second and is holding up fine (load avg. is still under 1.0). I'm
guessing there may be some routing problems — antipope.org is hosted in the
UK.

~~~
throwanem
It did seem a little atypical to see your blog struggling under HN traffic.
Now I guess I know why!

------
kardianos
And this is why I program in Go.

Hardware OS Program (no libc, no dynamic libs, no external runtime)

Go specializes in "it runs like you read it". I hate magic in my program and I
distrust programmers who program like a magician.

~~~
cname
Go is still a pile of abstractions built on top of another pile of
abstractions that almost no one fully groks. It doesn't seem significantly
less "magical" than any other commonly-used language, especially from the
perspective of non-wizards, even if it _might_ be a better tool for casting
certain spells.

------
gallerdude
When I was a preteen, I'd watch Notch's ld48 programming streams, and I'd just
be confused. I had read the basics of if-statements, for-loops, and functions,
but he was using them in a way beyond my comprehension.

Later I discovered MIT's Scratch, and it let me figure things out on my own:
games, physics, genetic algorithms.

I think programming is portrayed to be more difficult than it is. It's a
mixture between programmers trying to find the most efficient system, and the
public's half-uncertainty of computers being magnified.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Wait, you can do genetic algorithms in Scratch?

~~~
nickpsecurity
[https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/30924542/](https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/30924542/)

~~~
gallerdude
I'm not sure if that was intentional, but yeah that's mine!

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Looks like it's starting to buckle, mirror just in case:
[http://archive.is/Vx9u7](http://archive.is/Vx9u7)

------
abecedarius
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.

------
morgante
This metaphor is really stretched thin and doesn't help much with explaining
anti-tech sentiments.

I really don't see why complicated wizardry is required for something to be
magical. That seems to be an assumption coming from the author's genre. There
are plenty of brands of magic which include extensive creation of magical
artifacts which anyone can use (akin to consumer electronics).

As for anti-tech sentiments, I don't think any complicated allegory to burning
witches is required. It really just feels like the natural result of
technologists gaining wealth—almost every high-earning profession has
significant critics (cf. lawyers, investment bankers).

------
choonway
There was a magical crystal that blessed the land with bountiful harvest every
year, until civil war broke out in the country. Mysteriously the crystal
shattered into a thousand pieces and parts of it fell all over the continent.
Some parts were irrevocably lost.

After the civil war was settled, and the country split in two, famine ravaged
both sides. It is up to you, my courageous wizard, to recover the parts that
still exists, and to rediscover how to recreate the parts that were destroyed,
and reassemble the crystal into a whole again.

Hostility from former enemies, unexpected allies, and dark conspiracy abounds.

... Yep, that totally describes my current gig with an MNC right now...

------
throw2016
This whole mystifying programming may be good for the ego but its not real.

Anyone sufficiently interested can learn programming, and even work as a
programmer without a degree and the 3-4 years of education and training other
professions require.

And programming is not particularly difficult, people learn for more than
16-20 years of their life. Those interested will pick it up.

There is something seriously wrong in the tech community when many are quick
and even eager to think of others as stupid. This is not only immature but its
disconnected from reality. I think many should spend compulsory time with kids
to understand how truly wonderful the human brain is.

~~~
wavegeek
> many are quick and even eager to think of others as stupid

There is no hard data I could find but I would guess* that the average
programmer probably has a higher IQ than 100. So if we define "stupid" as "not
as smart as oneself" then this belief is probably somewhat true.

*Having worked with a lot of different kinds of programmers and having also worked with the general public.

------
pdkl95
From the first comment:

> I don't think we're looking at a Butlerian Jihad any time soon

I personally know _many_ people that see something Butlerian Jihad-like as
inevitable. Most say they would regret the loss of some technology, but the
appeal of being free of complex _wizardry_ trying to manipulate them in ways
seem forever outside their understanding has increased a _lot_ over the last
few years.

A small-ish subset of that group are actively trying to start a Buterian
Jihad. Don't write off the possibility of blowback from the growing group of
people that feel technology (and the people that make it) are "disrupting"
their income wht remains of their agency over their own lives. There are many
ways that could play out - most are not full revolts against technology - but
predicting the future is hard. What I do know is that when you see pitchforks
and torches... _it 's too late_.

------
jstewartmobile
Only wizards in some kind of coastal ego bubble

More like " _Burn the programmer! Adobe has crashed for the third time today!_
", or " _Burn the programmer! YouTube has 100k+ likes on my copyrighted video
(that someone else uploaded), and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!_ "

------
hitekker
From what I've heard, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic" seems unsupported by available historical
evidence:

[https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32371/38995](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32371/38995)

>Among others. I searched and read a lot, looking for anything along the lines
of "the long-isolated tribesmen were amazed at seeing a cell phone for the
first time, and asked 'what kind of magic is this?'" But I have not found
anything that relates a story of confusing technology with magic.

>The additional point about the tendency of visitors to THINK they've been
perceived as superior divinities is extremely valuable.

------
AlexCoventry
This reminds me of the hostility towards the Tinkers in Vernor Vinge's _The
Peace War_.

------
kbenson
_(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.

~~~
thenomad
Hah! That's an interesting idea. I might just think about doing that for an
April Fools' or similar...

------
kemonocode
I think it's less of an issue of programmers in general in danger of being
seen as witches and more of a _certain_ breed of programmer. You know the
type. Not even the obviously "bad guys" and "hackers" induce that much of a
visceral reaction.

The sort of kid so detached from their community that yes, they might as well
live in a haughty ivory tower with a handful of their peers and bring their
arcane gizmos wherever they go and look down upon muggles in disdain. Those
are I'm worried about giving the rest of us spellweavers a bad rap.

------
SCHiM
Haha yes, many have laid the link between magic and computers/programming. I
remember as a child being very interested in magic and that fascination
naturally refocussed to computers in my adult life.

Also check out this website for a funny parable about computers, DNS, wizards
and the NSA: [http://grimoire.computer/](http://grimoire.computer/)

------
thenomad
If people enjoyed this post, you might be interested to hear that the author
(me) is currently doing an AMA over on Reddit, too -

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hanco...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hancock_i_founded_machinima_and_made/)

------
pfarnsworth
No. The only people that seem to get upset about this is the media, because
their power is being usurped by Facebook, and Silicon Valley itself. Go 30
mins outside of the Bay Area and everyone thinks Silicon Valley is great, and
programmers work magic. Living in this tech bubble gives a skewed view of the
world, but really no one cares.

~~~
derefr
Even the people whose jobs are being displaced by automation?

~~~
ben_w
I get the impression that right now they’re too busy blaming offshoring and
immigrants to realise that their jobs have been automated and _nobody_ is
doing them.

~~~
Jach
Or figuring they'll just get another job, or their job will have them do
something else instead of whatever it is that got automated.

------
barce
'But I can't help but feel, looking at a lot of the media pushback at the
moment, that a lot of it is straight-up fantasy novel 101 "Reactions To
Wizardry".'

If the last US recession is any indication, the elite (in this case, the
quants), can ruin a national economy and not get burned.

I wish the author gave less vague examples to his claims.

------
meheleventyone
I’m suspicious of the idea people are afraid of wizards versus wising up to
the fact that wizards aren’t as wise and just as society presumed they were.
They’ve found out that wizards are just people with a particular skill set.

------
jhanschoo
The notion of a terribly powerful yet unintelligible wizard really isn't that
novel a situation. Lawyers have long suffered that role, and among several
communities (e.g. anti-vax, alternative med.), medical doctors too.

------
wonderbear
Most of us would just be full of ourselves to call ourselves magicians or
imagine that anyone else sees us that way.

But there are people working towards creating things that no one will be able
to control once they're out.

~~~
quickthrower2
That horse has bolted

------
foxhop
I wrote about this in 2011 -

[http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-
alchemy/](http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-alchemy/)

Programming is like Alchemy

------
kkotak
If anyone's burning the programmers is the AI, Block chain programmers. Very
soon, the industry will need/have a very small fraction of programmers than
what we have today.

------
kral
I won't call it magic, for me programming is like alchemy.

------
computerwizard
I think about this a lot. To control atoms and construct new systems using
language and thoughtforms alone seems as close to magic as you can get.

------
jrs95
So if programmers are wizards, who is our Voldemort that wants us to rule the
world? ;)

~~~
endgame
He who controls the book of faces.

~~~
thenomad
Goddamn, that really does sound sinister as hell.

------
jtmarmon
interesting premise in the article but masked by horrible writing. i had to
reread this multiple times to understand the point of it. the transition from
talking about VR to programming was incredibly vague.

~~~
moron4hire
I disagree. I thought it was very clear and concise.

------
beefield
relevant xkcd flowchart to wizardry:

[https://xkcd.com/627/](https://xkcd.com/627/)

------
draw_down
To me, many forms of artistry like singing and dance are so much more magical
than anything we do. We just type a bunch of shit into computers until they do
stuff, poorly.

