Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

So the city of Tevanne, and its many nascent scriving houses, then had a problem to solve: how were they to house all the definitions and meanings for these complicated scrivings without having everything burst into flames and melt? Which was why they’d invented lexicons. Lexicons were huge, complicated, durable machines built to store and maintain thousands and thousands of incredibly complex scriving definitions, and bear the burden of all of that concentrated meaning.

“The magic is scripts of code that are housed on giant magic databases” is something that makes intuitive sense, but is hard to articulate organically.