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Comment by wheaties | Hacker News Reader

Why, to this day, am I still mesmerized by Legos? Is it the fact that it was my first "engineering" like activity which allowed unconstrained creativity that ultimately lead to my career in software engineering? Or was it more mundane, Robinhood never looked so good until I made him battle a space alien...

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Lego is low-barrier-to-entry hardware programming for children - i.e. people who haven't yet learned that normal people don't make things.

There is a theory that OO really caught on in the 80s/90s because of a generation that had first grown up with interchangeable identical building blocks of Lego bricks in the 70s

Now I'm wondering what a functional building toy might look like.

Logo?

A lego toy that could only return copies of lego toys?

I just bought a LEGO set the other day for a fun little diversion. To this day at the ripe age of 33 it's still therapeutic and very enjoyable to kick back and build a car out of LEGOs. I really enjoy the designs they come up with, complete with little hints of suspension viewable from the wheel well. The car even has the little trough where the windshield wipers would live.

My mother-in-law bought me a Lego F1 Ferrari for my birthday a couple of years ago. Probably the best gift I've received since I was a kid. Because it turns out that I still I like playing with Lego, but I no longer think to buy it for myself.

I don't know, but I bet there is a very strong correlation between played with lego as kid : works as software developer now.

I wouldn't be willing to work out which one comes first. Does playing with lego cause you to want to build things, or do you want to build things and naturally start playing with lego.

It's the most awesome toy ever built. I've started my kids on Lego as soon as they could hold the bricks, and informed all relatives for all presents to be from the house of Lego.

It's also one of the only toys with resale value (after being played with); the ebay auctions for Lego are hard to win.

It's like trying to understand people who are incurious about technology.

Lego are joys to hackers! We like to think, modify, and build things.

The Minecraft developer should implement lego NXT-esque stuff in his game :)

He does have Redstone, which is Turing Complete, to the point where someone built a 16 bit ALU (I think they went further than that though) out of it. I've seen a few seven segment displays in it too.

I'm working on a game -- when time allows -- that lets you build and race vehicles using Lego Technic-style pieces, e.g. gears, motors, belts, blocks, etc. It's honestly pretty easy from a tech perspective (I'm using Python + PyOgre + Bullet for the core of it), but presenting the vehicle designer to the user in a nice way is really tough. I'll announce the alpha here as soon as I have anything, of course.

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