We’re programming computers. We spend large parts of our days writing down instructions for machines. Other parts of the day are spent making sure that we chose the right instructions. Then we talk about those instructions: why and how we picked the ones we picked, which ones we will consider in the future, what those should do and why and how long it will probably take to write those down.
It can sound very serious and dry; a bureaucracy of computer instructions. And yet.
And yet we, the ostensible bureaucrats, talk about magic as something that exists — the good and the bad kind. There are wizards. Instructions are “like a sorcerer’s spells”.
We don’t call them instructions, though, not when talking about what we produce each day anyway. It’s code we write. Emotions are involved. Code, we say, can be: neat, nice, clean, crafted, baroque, minimal, solid, defensive, hacky, a hack, art, a piece of shit, the stupidest thing I’ve ever read, beautiful, like a poem.
Some lines of code are a riddle to anyone but their author and the name code serves as a warning. Other times, strangely, it’s a badge of honor.