Magic

If you know me, you may remember I used to be a RoR programmer a while ago, and one of the concepts that I really liked about RoR, was that so many things could be done "automagically"


And today I came across a really cool definition regarding magic itself. here it goes


magic
1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare automagically and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” “TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits.” “This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions.
2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called black magic).
3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled.
4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's Third Law: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced”.
Parodies playing on these senses of the term abound; some have made their way into serious documentation, as when a MAGIC directive was described in the Control Card Reference for GCOS c.1978. For more about hackish ‘magic’, see Appendix A. Compare black magicwizardlydeep magicheavy wizardry.

Taken from: http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/M/magic.html

Also, be sure to check their A Story About ‘Magic'.

And, as its custom, here I leave a related pic about magic, sort of


Taken from www.joeydevilla.com