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Comment by violiner | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to hardware, but there's certainly a certain similarity between occultism/esotericism and creating software - you have to be comfortable thinking about and working with things that, in a sense, don't exist. That doesn't mean they're not useful in their own way. It means that they don't have objective reality in the same way that a lake or a car or a building does.

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in the software world powerful spell books are definitely real : http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html

As a child, I would go to the library and bring home stacks of books on UFOs, magic, cryptozoology, and the like. I am always amused by the fact that so many of my colleagues in software development were just like me and claim to have had similar interests. Maybe a coincidence but I think there is definitely an underlying interest in arcane subjects.

I don't find it at all coincidental that software developers write and speak in 'code'. Software development literally is esoteric - "intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialised knowledge or interest". Given there are 7 billion people on the planet, there's a lot of software developers kicking around at the moment, but they still represent a tiny fraction of the population. I think we tent to forget are concepts in the IT world that are so highly abstract they seem like magic to the average person. I'm a metal fabricator by trade, every day my mind boggles that we have tamed electricity to be able to fuse metals flawlessly. The number of things that have to come together to support the modern world is "magic" to me in a romantic sense.

Engineers, software developers, hardware developers, technicians, and trades people have literally assembled this world (the built environs) from dust (raw materials in general).

You don't say! :)

Try googling for "the wizard book." See first result.

Marvel at the book's cover, http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

P.S. for a kinda-scientific treatment of "what if magic was real [and obeyed internally consistent laws]?", see ongoing scifi story http://qntm.org/ra

The TV Tropes folks have categorized this idea as "Magic A is Magic A":

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA

The description of Magic Engineering in Ra is worked out pretty entertainingly, with people setting up university departments, research programs, companies, etc., to apply magic to things like manufacturing and transportation.

Spoiler alert for Ra (no really, go read the story instead of this spoiler):

Va gur yngre puncgref vg'f funcvat hc gb ybbx yvxr gur ernfba gung "zntvp vf erny" vf abg gung vg'f n shaqnzragny cneg bs gur angher bs gur havirefr, ohg gung vg jnf vzcyrzragrq va gur cnfg ol uhzna orvatf sbyybjvat n grpuabybtvpny fvathynevgl, lrg gung gur crbcyr fghqlvat vg naq cenpgvpvat vg gbqnl qba'g xabj gung gung fvathynevgl unf unccrarq. (Gur choyvp jebatyl oryvrirf gung zntvp jnf nyjnlf n cneg bs angher.)

Gur rknpg ernfba gung gur trareny choyvp vf pbzcyrgryl hanjner gung gur fvathynevgl vf nyernql va gurve cnfg (be gung zntvp vf n uhzna perngvba!) vf fgvyy na rkpvgvat cbvag bs batbvat qvfchgr va gur fgbel, naq V'z dhvgr rkpvgrq gb svaq bhg gur nafjre.

..english letter frequency table based remapping did not help me here (and that was the extent of my effort).. I'm beginning to think that this might have been one of those autoironic fourth wall story-narrative-mocking jokes! Did you just pull a Derrida on me?

(Thanks for the tvtropes article; it links to another one (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MinovskyPhysics) which mentions "Schild's ladder"; which makes their arguments ex vi termini pretty great!)

It's ROT-13, try this http://web.forret.com/tools/rot13.asp - and a nice way to obfuscate a spoiler.

Ah! I should have known better. ROT-13 for the win!

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