What Kind of Sorcery Is This? Why code is so often compared to magic

My favorite part of The Magicians series is how complex and real the magic system felt. It was a science just like physics or chemistry. You had to work to get spells right, and creating new spells must have taken many many years of building up abstraction layers and "architecture" so as to allow more complex mechanisms.

Another book that delved into this was "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook. Haven't read the second two books in the series yet, but the cool part was when he realized how by combining certain basic spells, he could create something that was essentially a programming language for magic.

Another one that I started getting into (although the writing style isn't my favorite) is Ra [1]. There magic is just like any other engineering discipline in college.

I'd love recommendations for other books where magic is treated like computer science if people have them.

Back to the topic though--where I work our engineers actually have the official title of "Sorcerers." While I'm not an engineer myself, I consider myself fairly tech savvy and have been teaching myself Ruby and RoR over the past couple years to augment my HTML/CSS/JS knowledge. I still have that sense of wonder when I realize realize all that time I saved by abstracting something away to a single function.

Another book that gave me a similar feeling of awe and humbleness was "Code." It starts with wires and relays and explains how computers work from the ground up. At first it was easy to follow, then I got lost on the combinatorics. Hoping to pick it up again, but it really goes to show how much truly arcane knowledge is required to get us to where we are today. I'd wager most developers out there probably could not assemble a full set of logic gates from a NAND gate if you asked them to. To them, hardware and perhaps even low level systems are, for all intents and purposes, magic.

Then you look at the general population of non-tech-savvy people and while they may take things for granted, devices like cell phones, iPads, etc. are truly magical devices. It's like living in a high-magic D&D campaign setting like Netheril where magic is plentiful and embedded into every aspect of life.

What an amazing time to be alive.

[1] https://qntm.org/ra