> I was a Psych major, so code was always more “writing” than “gears” to me… It was ALWAYS “magic.
The magic is supposed to disappear as you grow (or you’re not growing). The true magic of programming is you can actually understand what once was magic to you. This is the key difference I’ve seen my entire career - good devs intimately know “a layer below” where they work.
> Perhaps because humans are also nondeterministic
We’re not, we just lack understanding of how we work.
I’m not talking about “magic” as in “I don’t understand how it works.”
I’m talking “magic” as in “all that is LITERALLY happening is that bits are flipping and logic gates are FLOPping and mice are clicking and keyboards are clacking and pixels are changing colors in different patterns… and yet I can still spend hours playing games or working on some code that is meaningful to me and that other people sometimes like because we have literally synthesized a substrate that we apply meaning to.”
We are literally writing machines into existence out of fucking NOTHING!
THAT “magic.” Do you not understand what I’m referring to? If not, maybe lay off the nihilism/materialism pipe for a while so you CAN see it. Because frankly I still find it incredible, and I feel very grateful to have existed now, in this era.
And this is where the connection to writing comes in. A writer creates ideas out of thin air and transmits them via paper or digital representation into someone else’s head.
A programmer creates ideas out of thin air that literally fucking DO things on their own (given a general purpose computing hardware substrate)
The magic is supposed to disappear as you grow (or you’re not growing). The true magic of programming is you can actually understand what once was magic to you. This is the key difference I’ve seen my entire career - good devs intimately know “a layer below” where they work.
> Perhaps because humans are also nondeterministic
We’re not, we just lack understanding of how we work.