Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
As an extended toy universe Lego is great but as STEM skills and intuitions catalyst it is a cul de sac of arrested development. There is a weird way it directs your attention away from all the hard problems, which are partly encapsulated away, partly curated out entirely.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It is an extremely expressive medium for modeling some closed-world subsets of engineering in a way that achieves a certain stylized skeuomorphic fidelity at the expense of insight into base principles. Technic mitigates that somewhat but still feeds the wrong motivations.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Toy universes are like standardized tests. Being good at standardized tests mainly demonstrates that you have a talent for standardized tests. Being good at Lego mainly demonstrates that you’re good at Lego. True of toy-like programming languages/environments for kids too.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
There is a like Lego-like streak in OOP philosophy but unlike Lego, it enjoyed decades of practical use because it was a leaky mixed paradigm. Smalltalk = Lego probably. C++ = mixed paradigm. Java = mighty striving to keep it Lego like in production that arguably failed by bloat.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I’m not a software developer but is it fair to say the history of programming as a Lisp —> C feature migration flow (I think Paul Graham made up that theory?) is a Lego —> real world migration flow?
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I’m developing a broader theory that Lego-like escaped realities are fundamentally unstable and their abstraction stack has to leak first them to persist. They last as long as the leakiness mitigates the tendency of the notional non-leaky ideal to float off into bullshit
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