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I think there's an interesting analogy to be drawn with Lego. You can build interesting and useful things out of Lego, more than you may even realize. It can be fast & effective, it's certainly easy, especially if you imagine we've abstracted away the question of what bricks you have so you have as many as you need of any kind & color. However, you end up with two sorts of problems if you start letting people just build solutions to whatever they like with Lego: 1. The solutions may work, but they aren't really that good. You can only do what there's Lego bricks for. When it comes time to solve the problem at the next level, the Lego stuff can be less helpful than it looks even as a prototype, as even at small scales a lot of the engineering in the Lego was solving around the limitations of Lego in the first place, rather than solving the problem per se. 2. Eventually you get people trying to build sheds and houses out of legos, struggling to put up shelves, all kinds of silly things that the solution isn't really suitable for. And there's a variety of pathologies here, too, like how they don't understand why their Lego solution isn't good enough, and why you can't just buff up their shelf since it's just that the shelf is falling over, and explaining to them that they basically just built a shed that is made out of code violations may not be very easy, etc. There are advantages, too, like letting them get their hands on some engineering and stuff, and there are a lot of problems in the world where a Lego solution is no big deal. I don't know if I've got anything right now, but I've done it before; I had a lego setup for holding tablets & phones for charging that was better than anything I've bought, because it actually had the correct sizes for things, for instance. But there's limits. |