
An Engineer’s Guide to the Docuverse - shalabhc
http://www.lord-enki.net/medium-backup/2018-06-06_An-Engineer-s-Guide-to-the-Docuverse-d080cdbb73a6.html
======
imglorp
Secrecy. Patent minefields. Alien ideas. It might be the cat's meow, but small
wonder why its advancements are still obscure and inaccessible.

The things we DO know and use daily were developed in the clear, in a public,
cooperative environment. Furthermore, implementations were often protected by
GPL or other means to keep them from disappearing into an IP hole.

This might be the most important lesson of the project.

~~~
zormino
Not to mention an open and sharing oriented community that implements their
projects in commonly used languages. Check out the Udanax gold downloads page
and try not to cry.
[http://udanax.xanadu.com/gold/download/index.html](http://udanax.xanadu.com/gold/download/index.html)

~~~
imglorp
Urf, that's rough.

On the plus side, this is an interesting project:
[http://www.erights.org/index.html](http://www.erights.org/index.html)

------
azeirah
> Transliterature, in all its incarnations, involves several concepts missing
> from or alien to mainstream computing: unique permanent addressing for
> immutable documents and source data, indirect document delivery, visible
> connections, and external markup. All of these ideas stem from a single
> basic idea: the manipulation of immutable sequences of bytes with permanent
> addresses.

> _unique permanent addressing for immutable documents and source data_

This would make _so much_ sense for programming.

If you copy a function from stackoverflow, or from github, or from a gist, or
whatever, you always know where it came from, who wrote it... instead of
"copying" where the code is now yours to maintain, you "refer" to it, you
"include" it. No-one can tamper with the inclusion, because it is based on
some kind of safe cryptography.

Wouldn't this be a great alternative/addition to apis and libraries? It would
allow us to include random functions and snippets from any other codebase
without ever having to worry about dependencies suddenly breaking everything
with updates.

~~~
mjepronk
Yes, for example the Dhall (non-Turing complete) programming language does
this: [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang](https://github.com/dhall-
lang/dhall-lang)

------
394549
> Xanadu concepts are, to a great extent, an alternate (and alien) universe.

Many of the ideas, paradigms, and systems pursued by computing pioneers
(especially of the 70s and 80s) feel this way, especially those that didn't
catch on but are still often talked about.

I feel that technological path dependence and an overemphasis on the lowest-
common-denominator user (and de-emphasis on power users) has really curtailed
a lot of _real_ innovation.

------
azeirah
Any idea where I can find a binary of the mentioned "Azz" program? I'd like to
try an alternative to Gzz, because I find Gzz to have a horrible user-
experience, the terminal might be easier.

