Information Technology and the Future of Society

Live from Cyberspace: The elective affinity between fantasy and computer programming:

Paul Dourish: The Original Hacker's Dictionary: "WIZARD n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works... http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

...someone who can find and fix his bugs in an emergency. Rarely used at MIT, where HACKER is the preferred term. 2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people, e.g., a "net wizard" on a TENEX may run programs which speak low-level host-imp protocol; an ADVENT wizard at SAIL may play Adventure during the day...


Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman (1993): Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html: "Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers...

...As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring…

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