this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to them. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they're making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

It's quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

[–] makr_alland 5 points 3 months ago

That sounds very interesting, do you remember the name or the author?