There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.
They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to it. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they become a Pretty Good Magician™ as all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, and they’re off spawning recursive spells and generally causing havoc.
It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work
You enchant rocks engraved with runes
Computer programmers are the wizards of the present.
There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.
They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to it. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they become a Pretty Good Magician™ as all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, and they’re off spawning recursive spells and generally causing havoc.
It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work
That sounds very interesting, do you remember the name or the author?