Okay so I am a computer science student, and here's what my parents and relatives think I do-
typing random letters and numbers into the computer system until it magically turns into some working mobile app, which is their expectation. While I am coding some addition program just for them to see 2+2=4.

So you're studying magic...

Which is a huge accomplishment! Because in our field 2+2 could easily be 4.000000001 😄

@SuspiciousBug Nah, two and four are both exactly representable as IEEE 754 floats. The smallest non-representable int is 16777217: https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

That is what we do. We cast spells on to a rock using a magical gibberish language and the stone obeys.

@fckIE

stone = "Dude"
print("The " + stone + " abides")

@fckIE I touch the right glyphs in the right order to formulate incantations representing my wishes. The computer is forced to obey what i say by sequences of glyphs formulated by previous masters of the craft. But like the proverbial devil, the computer obeys the rules i formulate, not my intent. So i have to be careful to rule out all possibilities i don't want the computer to manifest - lest one of them may become true.

I am very lucky to not have to deal with the tiny stone inside the contraption linked to the board of glyphs i use to dictate it my will. Manipulating it directly would be so much more rerror prone a ritual and require so much more components... No, i certainly don't inbue my will into the rock directly.

(old-ass dude alert, and from a poor part of India) when I started coding we barely even had computer sciences, the whole thing was called "electrical engineering with emphasis on discrete linear algebra"
When I tried to explain to my parents that I wanted to work with computers, they thought I was abandoning college to be a "car mechanic for appliances", like, soldering wires onto electrical components and stuff.
I still don't think they really get it.