Reality Hacking

[Max_Killjoy]

As an actual programmer I have issues with the magic-as-programming language idea.

The primary difference between fully developed languages (thats languages that have all the useful options built into them) is speed and ease of use. Machine will be faster than assembly, assembly will be faster than basic languages, basic languages will be faster than object oriented languages. But its basically the reverse for how easy and fast it is to write any given program.

Now you could reverse the order and it would make more sense. Gods get to say "planet Earth = new planet (habitable) {oceans: 7, minerals: 'high'};" and they get a nice planet using high level code, if they want changes they can define or refedine them sort of on-the-fly. Your grand high wizards are declaring a pointer to a struct, defining all the variables in the struct, entering the values, and then managing to get a demi-plane out of it, but they can't change what was set in the first place. A first level wizard would be checking his cheat sheet for the op-code for the multiplication operation and writing down what memory registers he initalized to hold the two numbers (that's what coding in assembly is like, annoying, slow, and easy to make mistakes in).

Your outer planes weirdness wouldn't really even be programming. It would know about buffer overflows, page file operations, race conditions, and hardware weaknesses. Using that knowledge of the operating system and hardware to force faults, throw errors, and expose data in ways that the programmers wouldn't be able to affect or counter.

So we have two scales here, somewhat inverted in comparison to each other.

One based on how close one is working to the fundamental level of reality and how directly one's "code" runs on the "hardware", and the other based on how quick and easy it is to write something and have it work.

Interesting.

Perhaps a better analogy would be permission levels in the operating system. The creator has root level access and can do stuff like delete users with impunity and tell the os to kill it's own processes. Gods have admin level access to run any programs and control users within their user groups. The mortal casters get to use and write apps but don't have access to the operating system, if they run a program that doesn't have an end condition (infinite loop, no interface) they have to ask an admin to kill the process. Then your SLAs or inherent abilities are just a group login with predefined apps they can use and no other access at all.

In this scenario the elder abominations are black hat hackers doing phishing attacks or trying for open com ports over wi-fi in order to insert viruses.

A third scale has appeared.