McLuhan had it backward: the message is the medium. (Apropos of work with @andy_matuschak on the mnemonic medium: https://quantum.country )
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It's very un-McLuhan to try to make legible what you've said, but anyway: I mean that when you're attempting to design a new medium, the content ('message') you use in your prototypes will strongly influence your design (and vice versa).
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I feel this particularly strongly in that a lot of prototyping work is for "toy" content. It's very difficult to make this work. Eg, I'm suspicious of the (beautiful aspirational) idea that Logo is a useful environment for introducing children to ideas of differential geometry
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The question that bugs me: why don't professional differential geometers use Logo? If not, what is it missing? Can that be remedied? I'm deeply suspicious that Logo is, perhaps, leaving out the most important ideas of differential geometry.
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I've left the connection to my original comment oblique. To make it explicit: this decision - the audience for Logo - is in some sense a content or message decision. By deciding to make a toy environment, aimed at children, Logo almost certainly fails in many aspirational goals
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End of conversation
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I have similar objections to Scratch based programming. Kids love it, but as a professional programmer (and even as someone trying to teach kids the real power of programming), the lack of abstraction is a complete show-stopper for me.
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well let's say you're teaching kids to multiply. you almost certainly want to use a toy environment. like arranging 2 lines with 4 marbles in each line. does this leave out some of the deepest ideas of multiplication? yes. but it's still a decent way to teach multiplication
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