can someone please convince me that the use of the word "magic" is justified? yes I know sicp is universally exalted in the cs/programming community and even though I haven't read it yet I support the principle of a principled approach to computation (it's math after all in the purest sense) but I can't support the infantilism of words like magic and the wizard on the cover of the book because the two themes are directly in opposition. there is no magic and clear rigorous analysis of programs is very fruitful.
Watching the SICP lectures, I had a moment of "I totally did not see that coming", with triple exclamation marks. The ability to do astonishing things with so little code justifies the word magic to me. Also magic as sleight-of-hand is not infantile to me, either. It's ingenious and practice, practice practice in order to astonish the audience.
Crowley defines magick as the execution of Will upon the world. Programming is actually a better fit for this particular definition than most of the western-occult-tradition ritual stuff Crowley himself was doing (including the enochian stuff).
Somebody with only a shallow pop-culture understanding of occult tradition is bound to associate it with fuzzy thinking & children's media. The use of alchemical metaphors in SICP indicates that the authors have at least some familiarity with the history of magick, though.
The most important figures in the western occult tradition were mathematicians (like Dee) or invented early computational or permutational devices (like Llul). Magick is very firmly bound up in this kind of mathematical thinking. On the other side, the mathematical foundations of computing come out of mathematicians who had occult justifications: Godel (and Cantor before him) was a mathematical platonist who dabbled in gematria, and his work on computability was part of the ars magna for him. (In case you're not up on the history, Turing's work on universal turing machines was an attempt to rephrase Godel's incompleteness in a way that was accessible to non-mathematicians, and his later work with Church proving the equivalence between Godel's model and lambda calculus was built upon this work. While computing machines predated this formal basis, the formal basis is pretty important -- we all learned it in college, after all!)
Maybe it's just me (I haven't actually read the book), but I don't see the guy on the cover as a wizard. He's holding a pair of dividers which I associate much more with a craftsman or study of geometry. I just assumed the clothing was a style I didn't understand.
There's an aphorism: "objects are a poor man's closure; closures are a poor man's object". When I got to the point in SICP where I understood that, the word "magic" was very definitely justified :)
