Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many developers today were forced to take an introductory drafting class. I know a lot of us played with Lego. The problem of describing a 3 dimensional object in two dimensions requires extra projections to describe the thing. A 3d object in 2 dimensions takes three drawings to mostly describe. If the object is more complex than three dimensions, you need to look at it from a lot more angles.

View on HN

Wow, decades in this field and it finally took your comment to connect my childhood LEGO obsession with coding. Simple enough, but it never actually crossed my mind. The funny thing is, I’ve always linked my love for storytelling to LEGO building, but not coding. Thanks for the insight, that just snapped into place.

Did I love Lego because I was like this, or am I like this because I loved Lego?

That'll bake your noodle for a good long while :)

Whoa…

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, did make a sound?

- Zen koan I read a while ago, might have got the wording a bit wrong, but a fun one.

Just googled, and it is Wikipedia too, but "koan" is only in the See also section:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_...

With respect to Lego and coding, now I'm thinking of the game Infinifactory, which has the nice property of yielding puzzle-answers where you can go: "Hey, I built that! Look at it operate!"

I had a drafting class as a freshman in engineering school. The professor would come to class with a piece of chalk and a string and proceed to us only these tools to construct complex three dimensional shapes, and show how to rotate them to give a different view.

One small example of a problem we were required to learn was that of a pipe running through a space at some angle and determine if it intersected something important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com