Demon Containment in IT and Computing

[sophiamcdougall]

Setting -- London, present day.

The protagonist is a woman who is a programmer -- or something in IT that allows her at least some of the relevant knowledge. She -- you know how it is -- finds herself saddled with a demon.

Comments

[the__ivorytower]

For your first question, simply being a programmer is enough. The IT bubble popped and it's left a lot of people with a hard time finding a job. Two of my friends graduated from college as programmers. One of them managed to get a job as a programmer, the other works for a company that hires out people to do tech support calls for other companies. The first friend had this job originally but quit because the stress was getting to him. You could use that angle, that she's a programmer who was forced to get a job doing not-programming, and then quit because it was trying to gouge out her soul with a spoon

[sophiamcdougall]

I'm sorry for replying to this so late. I've been moving house and have had terribly erratic internet access -- it's been so frustrating when people have been so helpful!

I think I'm making her a would-be programmer who's out of work at the beginning of the story, and doing something like your friend by the end of it.

[janewilliams20]

I'm a programmer. I wouldn't know how to create something like that (yet) but I know how I'd go about it. There's a thing called Second Life on the Internet. You want your own section of that, or a clone of that. Getting and running a clone would be a hacking job, nicking someone else's commercial code (and it's complex code). Hacking the actual Second Life application so as to keep the demon confined to one bit of it might well be easier. (I am not a hacker, I'm making intelligent guesses, but I'd also guess that a lot of people try to hack Second Life, because there's a lot of potential cash there, and it will be well protected

[eien_herrison]

Just throwing it out there: OpenSim is a free, open source version of Second Life (well, virtual worlds in general). From my work in it, it's self-contained and can run off a small server in a house (the grid I use is located in a house, although we are looking at getting it moved to a server). That plus a computer with reasonable specs = 24/7 access to a virtual world which can be completely self-contained (you'd need to know the log in URL for a specific grid, and also either have open registration or automatic acceptance to get in to a personal grid if you're not given the information).

[sophiamcdougall]

Thanks a lot for this and your other comments -- I'm really sorry to be coming back to this so late. Moving house and the consequent lack of web access sucks. I'm thus still processing all the incredibly helpful comments.

If you have any time for this now, could you give an example of the language she might have trained in, versus the language she might need to know now?

Do you think she might end up scavenging code from more than one source (1 just seems a little simple, I guess) -- is it possible to cobble it together? And is this compatible with your fantastic idea of programming in more than 3 dimensions? This was particularly cool because it gave me an answer to a question that had been nagging me -- why the demon likes her so much, more than the witch who sent it to her in the first place (and wants it back). Of course -- it likes her because it likes her coding! It sees it as a kind of really cool creative witchcraft, and her as something of a kindred spirit. So I now want her to be doing something along these lines, (with

[janewilliams20]

Sorry, I'm currently in hospital with internet via phone. My guess would be Java, but that's only a guess

[ext_1155348]

She could just be a games nerd who doesn't put so much attention into her day job. There are a ton of women who don't program for a day job who are obsessed with games and poke around them: a woman runs this DOS game site craigslist.org/about/best/all/ She could be a web developer, even, and poke at code in her spare time, and just not have the confidence to do it full-time, whether due to a specific experience or not. There are a lot of eccentric programmer-nerds, such as the guy who created Dwarf Fortress. That would certainly fit the bill for a demon-containing program, it's incredibly complex. I find all of these sorts of things far more fun to read about than to play; you can read about Dwarf Fortress here: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/... )

[ext_1155348]

No idea why that linked best of craigslist. The games site is Abandonia http://www.abandonia.com/

[mimerki]

You might actually want to look into spaghetti code or The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. In the first case, it would be a bit like setting the demon up with a giant tangled mass of yarn and wanting that yarn to be rolled into a ball. I'm not entirely sure how obfuscated code would work in (okay, I am having ideas of my own so: mayhap when it finally correctly runs the instructions this somehow forms the Tetragrammaton or such and then dumps it back at the beginning of the tangled mess).

The IOCCC page has examples of past winners as well, which would give you an idea about what C code looks like, at least.

[sophiamcdougall]

Very late reply, (I've been moving house, no internet access) but thank you for this! I'm looking at the IOCCC page now. It might be that she could incorporate chunks of that into the program as "puzzles" with rewards... However, the code's got to be somehow pleasing rather than simply perverse to keep the demon occupied.

I'm now thinking that she's a programmer who, per JaneWilliams20's suggestions, is out of work because she has minimal professional experience in the current language of the mode, having trained in something else. If you still have any time, do you have any ideas what the languages in question might be?

[mimerki]

Yes, I was thinking of it as an overly complex puzzle with confusing instructions, rather than just poorly formed. I suppose at that point it's a bit more like "knitted code" than spaghetti, but...

Just asked my programmer boyfriend: Cobol, Fortran, Algol, BASIC.

It's also possible for someone to be out of work because they know a base language but not the popular current version. HR may not understand that a good C programmer can learn C# very quickly...

[janewilliams20]

For a programmer to be out of work, they need to be an expert in the language that was in favour last year, but not this year, or even the wrong version of the right language. Yes, you can self-train, but getting commercial experience is another matter, and that's what employers want. Been there, done that, took an underpaid and overworked job with a tiny firm who were desparate enough to let me train on the job so as to get out of the trap. That's with 20-odd years experience of 20-odd languages, I hate to think what it would be like for someone more junior.