from Hacker News

Burn the Programmer

by thenomad on 11/10/17, 3:36 PM with 244 comments

• by japhyr on 11/10/17, 8:22 PM

  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.

• by stryan on 11/10/17, 4:27 PM

  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.

• by b0rsuk on 11/10/17, 4:50 PM

  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

  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.

• by j2kun on 11/10/17, 4:50 PM

  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."

• by marsrover on 11/10/17, 4:17 PM

  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.

• by fermigier on 11/10/17, 4:33 PM

  "...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.

• by iRideUnicornz on 11/10/17, 5:04 PM

  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.

• by robto on 11/10/17, 7:47 PM

  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/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

  https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

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

• by weeksie on 11/10/17, 4:44 PM

  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.

• by coldcode on 11/10/17, 5:07 PM

  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.

• by jszymborski on 11/10/17, 4:27 PM

  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.

• by throwanem on 11/10/17, 4:21 PM

  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.

• by kardianos on 11/10/17, 5:23 PM

  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.

• by gallerdude on 11/10/17, 4:23 PM

  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.

• by Sir_Cmpwn on 11/10/17, 4:27 PM

  Looks like it's starting to buckle, mirror just in case: http://archive.is/Vx9u7

• by abecedarius on 11/10/17, 8:41 PM

  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.

• by morgante on 11/10/17, 7:15 PM

  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).

• by choonway on 11/10/17, 7:37 PM

  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...

• by throw2016 on 11/10/17, 11:18 PM

  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.

• by pdkl95 on 11/10/17, 8:22 PM

  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.

• by jstewartmobile on 11/10/17, 5:39 PM

  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!"

• by hitekker on 11/10/17, 4:56 PM

  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

  >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.

• by AlexCoventry on 11/10/17, 10:51 PM

  This reminds me of the hostility towards the Tinkers in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War.

• by kbenson on 11/10/17, 8:51 PM

  (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.

• by kemonocode on 11/11/17, 4:20 AM

  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.

• by SCHiM on 11/10/17, 6:11 PM

  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/

• by thenomad on 11/10/17, 7:36 PM

  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...

• by pfarnsworth on 11/10/17, 5:24 PM

  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.

• by barce on 11/10/17, 7:21 PM

  '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.

• by meheleventyone on 11/10/17, 7:52 PM

  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.

• by jhanschoo on 11/10/17, 6:50 PM

  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.

• by wonderbear on 11/10/17, 4:57 PM

  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.

• by foxhop on 11/10/17, 6:54 PM

  I wrote about this in 2011 -

  http://russell.ballestrini.net/programming-is-like-alchemy/

  Programming is like Alchemy

• by kkotak on 11/10/17, 11:48 PM

  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.

• by kral on 11/11/17, 12:46 PM

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

• by computerwizard on 11/10/17, 6:27 PM

  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.

• by jrs95 on 11/10/17, 8:41 PM

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

• by jtmarmon on 11/10/17, 4:10 PM

  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.

• by beefield on 11/10/17, 6:02 PM

  relevant xkcd flowchart to wizardry:

  https://xkcd.com/627/

• by draw_down on 11/10/17, 7:08 PM

  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.