Softwaring

The practice of creating software has changed. We used to call it programming, but now it’s software engineering.

When it was programming, it was mainly a bunch of geeky types who really got off on telling the masses about why they were formatting their email incorrectly. (Actually, in the really good old days, there were no masses using email … just the geeky types.) They worked obscenely long hours because they wanted to, and they socialized by talking about work.

Now it’s all software engineering. High tech. companies want to ease visa restrictions so they can hire cheap labor from overseas. It’s all about methodology … agile, complete with scrums and sprints, terms borrowed from the world of sports to suggest some kind of healthy teamwork. It’s all about code reviews and design patterns and best practices and quality assurance.

Basically, software has gone from being an inspired work of genius to a manufacturing process that any company can adopt to ensure that their code will be of the highest possible quality.

See how well that’s working?

HPL

In an earlier post, I compared some of the magic in the Harry Potter stories with technology that's available today. It occurred to me that the best use of this overlap would be to implement a computer programming language whose built-in operators are spells from the Harry Potter books. We will call this, naturally, HPL (Harry Potter Language). As I first step, I'm proposing the following:

Command	Effect
Accio	Download file
Alohomora	Enable access
Avada Kadavra	Ctrl-Alt-Del
Confundus	Display engineer-written help message
Engorgio	Fill available memory.
Expecto Patronum	Launch a new process
Expelliarmus	Eject CD
Imperio	sudo
Legilimens	Show stack trace
Lumos	Brighten screen
Obliviate	Delete
Patrificus Totalis	Freeze computer1
Prior Incantato	Undo
Riddikulus	Can be substituted for any program written in HPL
Wingardium Leviosa	Upload file

¹Redundant on Windows systems.