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Comment by rottencupcakes | Hacker News Reader

Does it bother anybody else that he fails so miserably at solving the example he uses for this article: keeping the car on the road?

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No. He's not trying to keep a car on the road. He's trying to let you understand the problems behind keeping a car on the road, so that you should solve that problem for yourself.

I'm sorry then. I just personally find that how dumb his example is keeps this from being interesting at all.

Why not pick an example where his clear ability to make useful visualizations reveals some startling insight about an initially complex system that he then abstracts away to simplicity?

EDIT: Thanks for downvoting guys. If you felt this blog post revealed something fundamental and astonishing, how about explaining it to me instead of downvoting me out of anger? I think I'm done posting on this website.

I think the downvotes reflect the fact you are belittling this post when it is clearly brilliant.

Your reasoning that "he doesn't keep the car on the road" misses the point. He's demonstrating abstraction itself, and using a medium (reactive documents) that are really engaging.

Focussing on the car itself, kind of misses the point.

Calling his examples "dumb" just looks petty and deserves the downvotes, there is nothing about this that is "dumb"... it verges on "genius".

The blog post revealed something or probably two somethings fundamental and astonishing - one being a new ( to me ) process of problem solving, and the other being an almost virtuosic display of visualization. I disagree that it was anything to do with car control algorithms. As the author says, that example was picked after watching Alan Kay use it. Maybe the author felt Dr. Kay was a good example to emulate.

Actually, the opposite. As I read through the examples and played with the demos, several ideas for ways I would change the algorithm came up as I saw how his simplest algorithm failed. Which I think was precisely his point. Once you have these tools in place and can move up and down the ladder, you have learned much more about the problem domain, and better solutions become apparent.

No. His point is not about keeping a car on a road. Read the "Iteration" section.

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