Yesterday I wrote about programming as magic, quoting Hal Abelson:
There’s a good part of Computer Science that’s like magic. Unfortunately there’s a bad part of Computer Science that’s like religion.
Then I went to sleep, popping a pill of melatonin. That worked for about half an hour. Then I woke up and was unable to fall back to sleep for a long time, so I got back up in the middle of the night, popped two more of these pills, and sat in front of the computer.
I went to Hacker News and I found this article called Geek Mythology: The Religious, and Spiritual Folklore surrounding Programming.
The quote came to mind again.
And so it is like that. There is the magical and there is the religious aspect of this technology of information. “Informatics” – a word that, as many note, is the better name for this area of knowledge and practice than “Computer Science”. I suppose Hal Abelson would be among those many.
So what is the religious aspect? Perhaps it’s the bad side of the magic. When you get hung up on something and start treating it too seriously.