Who is the artist?
This symbol isn’t needed for spells this long, but it’s considered best practice and other wizards will make fun of me for not including it, even though it isn’t needed.
mood
“Oh, dude, you gotta stop using TJ’s Action Rune of Changed Files. That runebook has a backdoor to one of the hells now. Didn’t you see the patch notes?”
I never update my spell book and nothing bad has ever happened.
Help. Infernal imps somehow got inside my sanctum and used my scrying orb to send rude messages to the rest of the Circle.
You got lucky. Somebody snuck a wyrm into my codex that got all of my thralls mining for coin bits.
shout out to the trickster mod which is basically “what if magic is a lisp”
My brother in Christ, why must you inform us of cool things and leave us with less free time? 🫠
malice
Yeah that mod is really cool. The magic writing system is fucking awesome.
Even cooler than Hex Casting in my opinion (which is already super cool).
And It’s quite a bit easier to work with since it’s not stack-based and that you can edit different parts of you spell/program at any point.
Whats the issue with Stack based?
When I worked with a stack Hex Casting’s stacks, it was hard to go back and edit previous parts of the program that are stored deeper in the stack. A lot of it has also to do with Hex Casting’s writing design maybe, everything is evaluated more immediately from what I remember.
The other thing is that Trickster’s programs are tree/graph based, which makes the layout of the programs a lot easier to understand logically.
Syntax error: Mismatched △
FATAL ERROR! DRAIN ARCANE ENTRY IMMEDIATELY!
ARCANE ENERGY COULD NOT BE DRAINED AND WILL BE DISPERSED WHEN PROCESS IS TERMINATED.
Kernel panic: Syntax error in interpreted kernel code. Spell OS 0.2.437 will now terminate.*Firery explosion
“And that’s the most efficient way we’ve found of casting fireball. We’re still working on getting round to finding a more elegant solution.”
“Thank you for playing Wing Commander”
If you’re adding code you don’t understand to a production system you should be fired
Edit: I assumed it was obvious from context that I’m referring to copy-pasting code from stack overflow or an LLM or whatever without knowing what it does but apparently that needs to be said explicitly.
Man this is just another great example of why I think software is essentially magic.
At the root of it, the hardware, it’s magic smoke. It’s all based on magic from that point up - because the layer below the one you are using “works because it does.”
I think it depends a lot on a person’s individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there’ll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something “just works”, but it will no longer feel like that’s what your main field is based upon.
Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a “feel” for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don’t need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.
For my personal interest, I’ve learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn’t directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it’s built on a mystery.
I don’t recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don’t have to feel that our work is based on “magic smoke” if we really don’t want to.
ADDED: If anyone’s curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater’s YouTube videos about “Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!” It’s a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.
