[cookiecaper]

Minecraft is awesome because it provides a convenient and ready simulator for this kind of work. It gets people interested and involved. It just seems much more accessible than downloading a "real" simulator somewhere online. I think MC provides a great mechanism for exploration in electronics/circuitry and something like this proves it. What do you want this person to do instead?

[joe42]

> What do you want this person to do instead?

I get that Minecraft is fun, but wouldn't it have been more practical, in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software?

It'd be really cool if someone could build a CAD/HDL/programming "IDE" that was as "fun" to "play" as Minecraft, but still as "useful" as something used in "the real world." But I suppose this is the same desire that drives all of those "programming language for kids" projects that never really seem to catch on.

[dxbydt]

true story. when I was 16 ( way back in the early 90s), my parents enrolled me in niit.com (presently a billion USD company that was at the time a tiny 3-room outfit ). niit taught cobol. I hated everything about cobol. I thought it was a shit language and the people who taught me cobol were shit. We were supposed to build an inventory control module in cobol. I didn't know what an inventory was, so they gave me an econ book about manufacturing & inventory. I thought it was absolutely dumb to keep track of nuts & bolts & accounting & money & suchlike. So I wrote a cobol program to calculate the fourier coefficients of complex exponentials, since that's what I was studying at school. So my cobol program would painstakingly calculate the first five fourier coefficients of sawtooth waves & square waves & then using the partial sum, it would reconstruct the expansion by printing out the series on a dot matrix printer. All of this was running on some processor called intel 80286 xt and it would take 10 full minutes to just compile the code. One day I was standing by the dot matrix when the instructor walked in. He thought I was some precocious kid who had coded up a whizbang inventory module for acme corportation, so he expected nice tables with rows & columns of data on optimal number of nuts & bolts. But when he saw the printer slowly rolling out sawtooth waves and square waves of various frequencies, he completely lost it & yelled at me for wasting the precious resources of the dot matrix printer to do frivolous nonsense. I got a F on cobol.

[unimpressive]

> I hated everything about cobol. I thought it was a shit language and the people who taught me cobol were shit.

Well you probably weren't that far off on the former point.

>But when he saw the printer slowly rolling out sawtooth waves and square waves of various frequencies, he completely lost it & yelled at me for wasting the precious resources of the dot matrix printer to do frivolous nonsense. I got a F on cobol.

Maybe, but you get an A in my book. Because the image you just put into my head is magnitudes of awesome. The IBM-type manager yelling at this 16 year old hackerish kid for taking a computer joy ride. The same sort of computer joy ride that probably comprised the whole reason he had a job in the first place.

The irony is sweet (With a bitter aftertaste.), and I'm sorry you had to go through that.

[jacquesm]

> I get that Minecraft is fun, but wouldn't it have been more practical, in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software?

I find it all the more impressive because he used an environment that was not meant to be used like this.

That's like running the marathon with a handicap and still winning.

And if he can do it in minecraft I think that he'll take like a fish to water once he gets his hands on other, more powerful tools. That's mostly a matter of access, 16 year olds are more likely to have minecraft on the machines they have access to than CAD/HDL software and the hardware to go with it.

[joe42]

I absolutely agree that the hackish (you know what I mean) aspect of this feat makes it impressive, but I'd really like to see him work without the handicap.

Given his/her choice of tools, most people would probably be more expressive with Photoshop/GIMP than MS Paint, or AutoCAD/Blender/Poser/HDL/etc./etc. than Minecraft.

Programmers debate the expressivity of programming languages all the time. We're impressed when some genius kid re-implements Doom in TI-BASIC, but at the same time, I want to see that genius applied with the full leverage of the most expressive tools available.

Minecraft doesn't quite pass the Arc challenge. :)

[polyfractal]

I don't think this is quite true. I see minecraft as a good stepping stone into more advanced things.

When I was his age, I was using the Lego Mindstorms heavily. At first I started with the built in GUI language, which was extremely limiting. After that I moved to progressively more advanced languages and IDEs until I was using Not-Quite-C, a version of C compiled for the Mindstorms.

These things tend to work as stepping stones. Had the kid started on something like CAD, he may have gotten stuck at an impasse that was too difficult for him, lost motivation and went back to playing Call of Duty.

Perhaps his next project will be in a "real" application, instead of Minecraft, because he has the motivation and knowledge to move forward.

[DanBC]

CAD is expensive, or confusing, or both. It's not much fun. The kit needed to play with HDL is expensive.

Really, this guy just needs a bit of sponsorship and guidance. Some tech company should send him "stuff"[1] and they'd earn some nice publicity.

[1] Development kits or test equipment or robots or whatever. And good books for it all. And maybe a gentle syllabus.