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Comment by jsjenkins168 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting about the mention of a relationship between building Legos and CS. The correlation between the two has been a theory of mine for a while. At least I have not yet found a hacker who enjoys building legos (or did as a child) that sucks at or doesnt enjoy building software. I have a feeling the mindsets required for both are strongly correlated.

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When I was a wee lad, I didn't know what software was, but I had a huge box of legos and an imagination. My parents would buy me the playsets, and I'd build them to get ideas about how "masters" built things and would proceed to immediately take them apart and build new things with the pieces and the knowledge. This also happens to be what good hackers do. Hackers are always reading code, reading about code and learning what the "masters" do. Then they piece together all that they learned and create something new. It's the same exact process, and that is why your theory is correct.

I never had enough legos to built anything creatively substantial. It was like writing a program in ASM with only ADD, JUMP, and LOAD.

I think it's more like having to fit your program within a 512 byte sector.

Add a jump-if-zero instruction and that might actually be Turing complete (assuming your ADD instruction will eventually overflow).

Actually, if the JUMP instruction allows an indirect address, then it is already Turing-complete. I know X86 treats indirect jumps as a separate instruction, but it's not hard to imagine an assembly language where the two use the same instruction.

EDIT: Nope, we forgot there is no STORE instruction. Thus, no way whatsoever of writing output.

Oops, good point about the indirect JUMP instruction.

Maybe we don't need a STORE. The ADD instruction could operate directly on memory operands. Then I guess we can ditch LOAD too.

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