If you like that kind of thing and you enjoy/don't mind anime, there's also the serie Knight’s & Magic. It is about a programmer being reborn in a world where people wield big "golem" armors. The protagonist then proceed to make his own version, completly disregarding the philosophy of that world. Thinking of those golems as nothing more than machines and using magic as nothing more than "inputs/outputs" for those machines and the world.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/knights-magic

"A genius programmer and hardcore robot otaku is reborn into a world of knights and magic, where huge robots called Silhouette Knights roar across the land! Now reborn as Ernesti Echevalier, he uses his vast knowledge of machines and programming talents to begin to make his ultimate robot. But his actions have unexpected results...?! The dreams of a robot otaku will change the world!"

From an unofficial (and somewhat grammatically atrocious) English translation of the original novel [0]:

> Normally, Eru would have given up at this stage and would have chosen a more practical spell. But he knew how to solve the problem because of his unique skills ― programming concept. He had experience in designing and coding software to handle multiple variables. That's why he skipped the beginner magic phase and jumped straight into the 'modified magic' phase. Reviewing the structure of the physical boost script, Eru compressed the structure to minimise the number of variables, creating subscripts that would automatically extract the status of the body. After compiling it, he just needed to design the user interface to make it easier to control, so as to lessen the burden.

> Complicated projects like the improvement of scripts was not something that could be done easily by anyone. Eru, however, was not aware of this, completing the improvement shortly, and the patch was a big enhancement. But even so, it was still difficult to control magic that strained the mind heavily. But with his extraordinary processing ability, it was not much. No one realised that a historical revolution had occurred, but for Eru, this was just a small step in his journey.

[0] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

The regular wizards use it to, let's say, make a door open when someone says "open" or other minor one-step commands.

The protagonist, a modern human stuck in a magical world, uses it differently. He creates sequences with it. He scripts complex programs.

[Minor Spoiler] As an example, he ends up creating a magical pistol. When the users speak "reload", the pistol (which the character imbued with a few spells using "enchant") casts a detection spell to finds the closest bullets. If bullets are found, the pistol then casts the spell "aports" on it. The bullets are teleported into the chamber of the pistol. He uses the same concept but with transmogrification enchantments to add voice commands such as "sword mode" or "pistol mode" that transform the pistol into a sword and vice-versa.

Is that bad? Like any didactic subtype of the genre, rationalist fiction often struggles to succeed in both of the goals set for it; the only example I've as yet found enjoyable - and extremely so! I strongly recommend it - is Unsong by Scott Alexander, also of Slate Star Codex.

https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ if you want something to read for next month(s).

Hasn't that gone out of style with Zola?

Thanks for the recommendation!

That being said, it's an interesting point of view. The character goes so far as taking personal a fight against a "golem plane" solely because he fears that the invention of planes will means that this world, like ours, won't have mechas. He doesn't have a care in the world but to use magic as a means to program mechas and completely disregards the fact that magic should be exciting in itself.

There is a section that muses about the future of humanity and how in the near future, these would literally seem like magic to anyone who doens't have technical know how, and for all intents and purposes, it was.

As soon as we get some sort of grey goo with an API like in Big Hero 6 or wrist mounted fireball/lightning generators we're in business.

"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.

When I see people design systems where, when they break, the only way to diagnose the problem is to do a code review, (not read the logs, or fire up a debugger), I wonder how they got along in their education without understanding the importance of debuggers, or why they hate their fellow programmers so much.

Spring comes out of a book that tried to reject the arcane nature of J2EE. I wonder sometimes if Mr Johnson recognizes hay the Beast he created is just as bad as the one he slayed. And how well he sleeps at night.

It got so bad they made a mini version of Spring, and even that is very declarative, and nearly impossible to explore.

In many, many applications explicit injection works just fine and is exactly what you want. But once you say "I am going to write a Spring Boot application", you are pretty much stuck with a big part of your application logic stuck in annotations, even when there is very little benefit over explicit code.

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.

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

That is precisely my consternation. Much, much easier to reason about abstractions in the core Java language, like methods and objects, then to discover what code is being injected by an annotation. Java has outstanding IDEs that excel at navigating, analyzing, and debugging Java code, but putting so much logic in annotations is almost like you are trying to deliberately keep much of the code secret from the IDE.

It's interesting you took the time to post this. As the sibling to this comment indicate, there's a lot of 'magic' in many languages and frameworks. not just Spring. You don't off an example of a tech stack you do favor so one can only guess.

I will say that when I have encountered developers and teams who also disdain otherwise popular frameworks, they sometimes choose to roll their own instead of buckling down and learning said framework. Invariably they end up with a partial implementation of what they didn't understand, that is bug ridden, ill performing, and just plain bad.

There's a lot of good stuff in Spring (and EJB, and rails, and ...) the onus is on us, as professionals to learn it and use it where and when it's appropriate.

I think annotations are used many times in Java where abstractions like first class functions would be used in other languages.

I also find Lisp macros easier to reason about. "This compile time source code expands to this run time source code, which executes like so."

Perhaps surprisingly, I even find Ruby magic easier to reason about. "This method causes these three other methods to be defined to do x, y, z." It can get confusing, and final behavior highly dependent on the order in which the code executes, but I still feel like I have a mental model of how everything executes.

With annotations, depends on the code processing the annotations. You could have different code doing different thing with the exact same annotations. Your IDE can take you to the annotation declaration, but not directly to the code the annotation causes to execute. In the debugger, you can see the code in the call stack that was generated, but no link back to what annotation caused it to be generated.

It all just feels more like memorizing spells at Hogwarts, and less like an engineering process.

A magic Apple II makes an appearance, if I'm remembering correctly...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EF8Z32I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Sounds a lot like the "Magic 2.0" series by Scott Meyer.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/131379-magic-2-0

In that world, "magic" is very much a direct result of programming. I've read the first two books in the series and enjoyed them a lot. For anybody whose into that sor of thing, I recommend this series highly.

They definitely focus more on the programming nuance. It's also cool how they introduce technology and interfaces from different periods of computing due to the time traveling aspect.

>At the start of the story he has a legitimate positive agenda--he wants to use science to uncover the secrets of magic. As the story develops, however, he completely loses sight of that goal, and he instead becomes just a passenger in the plot--he competes in Quirrell’s games and goes through school like any other student. When Voldemort starts including Hariezer in his plot, Hariezer floats along in a completely reactive way,etc.

>Not until spoiler dies, near the end of the story, does Hariezer pick up a positive goal again (ending death) and he does absolutely nothing to achieve it

I personally loved HPMoR, even more so than the original series. I also disagree with most of the review, either factually (I believe most of the science is sound), or because I have a different interpretation (how Harry lacking agency is even a problem?).

I assume I am not the only one who destroyed at least some amount of his personal data doing computer magic [1]. This would be analogous to a spell going wrong, burning the witches' hand or something similar.

[1] Be it an incorrect incantation of rm, or just a poorly aimed flick with the pixie pointer.

This is probably the most useful thing ESR ever wrote: http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/250m73/oc_no_graves_fo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/249hj7/oc_invitation/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/25qa83/oc_the_gods_sle...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b1vqr/oc_humanitys_de...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3baheq/a_kingdom_of_as...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3m704i/oc_cultural_exc...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3jfu5t/oc_assimilation...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4868zu/oc_janitor/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/45tsrn/the_hunt_inspir...