We Need Legos for Code | Hacker News Reader

We Need Legos for Code

breadchris.com

17 pointsbreadchris21 comments

The dream of "Legos for code" has been around practically as long as code itself. It's such a ubiquitous meme that back in the Nineties Douglas Coupland wrote a popular novel about it, Microserfs (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2748). History is littered with the carcasses of startups that took up the challenge. That same siren song has now called up a new generation of "no code" platforms. Time will tell if any succeed.

It is interesting to see everyone’s attempt at trying to make this happen. And of course there’s no silver bullet and everyone is going to have their own opinions on how to do this but when I have seen tools like GRPC work for a company’s like Google and Uber it seems to me that this is the right abstraction, at least when it comes to services communicating with each other. I like code that can stay around for a while, and in its time, Java was (and arguably still is) a great abstraction that lets someone plug things together. I want to give people that satisfying “snap” when things go together nicely and for what they build to stay around.

Lego Mindstorms (gen 1) was one of my first coding experiences and one in which I really started to learn about the power of state machines versus lists of instructions. It had intuitive drag-and-drop software pieces that mirrored the same hardware pieces IRL. Wish it still existed for kids today

It does, I have it right here?

If you're referring to Robolab it was actually based on LABView under the hood. LABView is well known drag and drop programming interface built by National Instruments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms#Use_in_educati...

source: My robotics professor developed Robolab and we got tons of cool shit from LEGO

Isn’t that what Brad Cox tried to do with Objective C around 1985.

https://rietta.com/blog/brad-cox-died/

Yes. Software-based ICs.

https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/03/software-ics-binary-comp...

Thank you both for nurturing such architectural concepts by putting Mr Cox in historical context.

I think the Lego analogy is perfect, actually. When I think about the evolution of Legos from my childhood to that of my own child, it's a journey of ever-increasing specialization. My Legos were pretty basic, with maybe a wing shape or two (space Legos, anyone?) or a cockpit.

For my son, it seems like each kit is mostly custom shapes, or at least shapes so specific that I spend more time looking for the "right piece" than just building something close enough out of a much more limited set of things.

Low/no code feels the same way. I can do a lot of things with them, but it's never exactly what I want. Perhaps the real issue is with what I want, but I suspect that I'm not alone.

I’m really looking forward to when I can show my kids what Legos are. I don’t remember many of numerous plastic toys i had growing up, but i remember the things that were built well. Wooden blocks, a box with a variety of metal latches, and of course legos. People know a good thing when they see it and feel it, regardless of age. I am really fortunate I didn’t have to deal with Megablocks lol

*Lego

With that out of the way, it is worth contemplating the different expressiveness of a 3D discrete medium (Lego), vs a 1D discrete medium (code, prose). Counterintuitively, it is actually the 1D medium that is more expressive (i.e. can express a wider range of ideas, in more varied ways). It's as if the extra dimensions become a straight jacket of sorts.

Perhaps we can paraphrase this as 'the unreasonable effectiveness of symbols'. Formal mathematics is just symbols, and yet it completely describes our natural world as far as we know it, and a lot more besides.

(Actually the key thing is we don't have a reduction engine for Lego, so no means to make it 'come alive')

Do we have Lego for anything else ? I mean, Lego, the toy bricks, they are great as toys.. Maybe even simple for mechanical prototypes, but I don't suspect for really clearing any new ground ? Mostly "Look, I did that thing.. but in Lego!"

But, outside of maybe mechanical prototypes.. Are anything being made and shipped, that's not a toy, that uses Lego ? Who's using Lego in production?

If not, why expect the metaphor to hold up for code, when it does not even hold up for Lego itself ?

Car industry embraced it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-RtJOfFlZU

Reminds me of OOP.

Industrialization forced the standardization of parts.

PL and libraries influence some standardization, but software is wildly bespoke today.

Low-code tools and Large language models writing code for us might further influence standardized inter-changeable "parts". The more standardized software is, the easier it would be for ML models to write it for us.

This is an interesting perspective of how ML can influence standardization. I have been thinking a lot recently about the dichotomy of structured and unstructured data and how each eb and flow. I have felt like a data plumber for quite some time and optimizing that process is a hobby of mine lol

Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 had a nice GUI for programming, starcraft 2 was a bit harder for me to deal with. Arguably something like magic the gathering that is written in a programming language instead of english would be helpful for programming literacy.

There’s a good reason we don’t build real buildings or machines out of legos

If you have functions that can compose from left to right, as a nice DSL, you're partway there.

I think this is how the Python package ecosystem is really close.

Code already is Lego.

You'd need infinite types of legos, or the ability to slice legos into infinitely tiny pieces... maximum customization essentially.

That's essentially what programming already is though. Especially things like functional programming.

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