Giles Bowkett: “Do You Believe in Magic?”

This post by Giles Bowkett on his blog is interesting. I think I’ve mostly taken this approach to programming — when I see cool things that I don’t understand, my base response is to try to understand them — but actually thinking about it in the broader perspective of magical versus rational thinking seems like an insight.

I’m from Chicago. I used to live in San Francisco. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but I always used to think it was silly when people from smaller towns called San Francisco “the big city.” Chicago’s population is about 40 times San Francisco’s population, and it felt tiny to me. Beautiful, no doubt, but tiny. That’s how I feel when I hear small-minded programmers calling a few mostly-elegant shortcuts “magic.” Because if you think that’s magic, you haven’t seen shit. That is some Palookaville, Omaha bullshit, and you need to see the fucking world.

…A rational viewpoint will serve you so much better, as a programmer, than a superstitious one. It’s not magic. There is no magic involved. It’s just, if you never learnt Lisp, then you never learned to program, and Ruby’s power is exposing a deficiency in your skills. That’s all.

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Permalink | July 23rd, 2009

Posted by Dan Hallock | Filed under Computer Stuff, Programming, Ruby