I have felt computing, and I can tell this is not it.

I signed up for programming more than half a young lifetime ago, when a program for making RPG games threw Turing-completeness to my face, inadvertently, unsolicited; when I couldn’t even begin to understand what was going on in my head and what kind of spirits I, the newcomer sorcerer, was awakening.

For every extremely dirty PHP line of code that soon followed I can at least say this: it pursued magic, and it tried, like the brute caveman who scratches the cave’s surface, beauty.

I have let deep inside my mind the beautiful API, the clarity of Lisp, the starkness of pointer fiddling, the harmonics of a good type system, the worse is better perhaps and simplicity as the ultimate enabler; the hard lessons, the humbling ice buckets over broken conceptions, the joy to be reborn every day, and the sudden, appalling realizations of to what extent I don’t have a clue about any of it. That frustrating and enlightening God-like awareness. And, boy, did I see it was good.

Does it look different to this.

This is about making your father proud and shit. Programming like filling out your tax forms or whatever. Shopping channel and self-help kind of thing. The book, the pattern or the guy giving talks that dictates the one true way. Cargo cult acronym mingling for self-assurance and office politics over thinking in data and functions and languages and just giving your best creative output. This is anti-computing. Not just not-computing, but the opposite.

The guild urgently needs to figure out how to bring business, down-to-Earth programming where all programming belongs: to the made up world of enchantments and mind ecstasy.

Meanwhile, mediocrity ensues, and sorcerers yawn.