Rincewind, programmers, and Eskarina Smith

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+# On Rincewind
+
+[Rincewind](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Rincewind), we are
+told, is a wizard. On the Disc, wizarding is a profession; Pratchett based
+them on the English academic system, with colleges and bursars and tenure. A
+wizard is a man of some academic distinction, or a student of such a man;
+career wizards are uniformly well-fed, of sound body (if not necessarily of
+sound mind) reasonably dressed, opinionated, crankish, and - importantly -
+capable of magic.
+
+Rincewind is a wizard: he is not well fed, having spent his life being thrust
+from one adventure to the next; his body is more attuned for running away
+from things than it is for meandering the halls or sitting by a fire; his
+opinions largely revolve around "is this new thing going to eat me," rather
+than more abstract matters; importantly, he is completely incapable of magic,
+in spite of years of study.
+
+Rincewind is a wizard, and the interesting thing about that is that the
+reader is expected (and I certainly did) take both his and the narrator's
+insistence on it at face value. Why shouldn't we?
+
+-----
+
+I had a conversation with [@aeletich](https://twitter.com/aeleitch) a while
+back, while she was teaching herself to program. I don't recall exactly what
+prompted it, but at one point I told her to stop worrying about all the
+better programmers out there: from everyone else's point of view, she was
+already a wizard. There might be better wizards, and worse wizards, but she'd
+already passed any sort of bright line delimiting "not a programmer" from
+"programmer".
+
+I think self-identification is important, and overlooked.