Homunculi and alchemists developers

[archiloque]

 It’s so strange to read modern books about early software developers, because so much of it has been rewritten to comply with corporate policy to remove all references to alchemy.

“These are a bunch of people that love to read strange books and deal with esoteric knowledge, and who are knows to invest fully in their passion, we’re bewildered by how much they achieved.”

I’m not bewildered at all, because these are the exact kind of people that would dabble in alchemy.

And when you have lots of thought-work to do, and dabble in alchemy, what do you do ? You create homunculi, the advanced alchemist’s best handy tool.

An alchemist developer can offload their more menial tasks to homunculi, so they can use their time and energy to deal with the complex stuff, thus achieving an impressive throughput “alone”.

I understand why corporate prefer to deal with teams composed of non-alchemists, even if it means much more people: alchemists are much harder to deal with a PM, and imagine an HR person asking one to fill their quarterly OKR.

Not to mention that the blood thing is a big no no in a standard office, imagining explaining this to OSHA people.

But when you erase the alchemists, so much of what they retcon makes little sense.

For example, lots of things that look like quirks in software development make sense when you know how homunculi works, because they are designed to match homunculi’s idiosyncrasies, to maximize what they can do. Next time you catch yourself thinking that C++ templates are not made for humans, remember that there is a perfectly good reason for that.

The best thing is “rubber duck debugging”.

“These cool developers from the 70’s and the 80’s used to have rubber ducks on their desk and talk to them to solve their problems”, they even write this with a straight face.

You know what these developers used to have on their desks ? Skulls! And why did they talk to them? Because the homunculus skulls were able to answer with actual solutions to their questions.

I don’t want to compare one type of developer to the other, alchemists are not superiors. But it’s not because lots of them are smug assholes that they must be erased from history, and from the present.

And a little blood here and there add spice to office politics.

Comments

[amiserablepileofwords]

Now I want a homunculus skull...

[archiloque]

Please only use ethically-sourced skulls!

[amiserablepileofwords]

But but but... my enemies are right there.

[archiloque]

Let me check my ethics manual… Well, I have good new for you!

[amiserablepileofwords]

Yay!

[duskpeterson]

Suddenly the software I use makes perfect sense.