Light­ning crack­les through my hind-brain, adeno­sine recep­tors light­ing up in sequence as caf­feine mol­e­cules fin­ish their long jour­ney from the hill­sides of South Amer­ica to the grey mass of pro­teins from which spawn con­scious­ness. My eyes open wider, and with them my mind. Fin­gers flicker and dance across the keys of mankind’s most arcane device. Thoughts, ideas, visions flash across my mind, pat­terns form­ing for just mil­lisec­onds. Then they explode through neural path­ways, twist­ing and con­tort­ing mus­cles that touch keys across the tiny por­tion of the real world that is still required for man and machine to work in har­mony. Then on again, elec­tri­cal pulses once more, com­plet­ing the jour­ney from pat­tern in flesh to pat­tern in silicon.

In another time and place, per­haps I would have been a shaman, ingest­ing pow­ders of strange jun­gle plants to achieve the same state beyond mere con­scious­ness, the same abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with the world, that I now achieve with caf­feine and a key­board. For the cre­ation of soft­ware is unlike any art or act of engi­neer­ing that came before it, and at times it bor­ders on magical.

The carpenter’s and the artist’s work both begin with an idea in their mind, but the end prod­uct of each one’s endeav­our is a real, tan­gi­ble object. What’s more, the carpenter’s chisel marks and the artist’s brush strokes become part of the work itself, for­ever a sign that human effort cre­ated it. But not so the magic of the pro­gram­mer. We have min­imised our tools as far as we can, allow­ing fin­gers to dash across keys as fast as our mus­cles allow, and still we yearn to do away with them entirely. Like the Chi to a T’ai Chi prac­ti­cioner, the key­board to us is a lim­i­ta­tion on the speed we can trans­late thought into real­ity, and the more we min­imise it, the more effec­tive we are.

At the end of the craft of soft­ware, there is no fin­ished item that can be picked up, exam­ined for work­man­ship, burnt to ash. There is just a pat­tern of mag­netic domains on a disk some­where, an elec­tro­mag­netic pat­tern the mir­ror twin of the elec­tro­mag­netic pat­tern in a brain that spawned it. By using a strange tool and a bizarre lan­guage which few under­stand, we take the pat­terns in our heads and over­lay them on the world as pure infor­ma­tion, pure pattern-stuff.

And that, dear friends, is noth­ing more or less than the prac­tice of magic.