
The Xanadu Dream - bdfh42
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001303.html
======
omouse
_He is the archetypal borderline autistic, non-conformist, free-thinking
technologist._

This is incorrect.

 _Like most programmers, Ted's reach often exceeded his grasp._

He can program, but he's not a programmer.

 _The above text is excerpted from the definitive 1995 Wired article on
Project Xanadu, which is still as electrifying to read today as it was then.
The hubris and sheer scale of the Xanadu dream are at turns both inspiring and
desperately, hopelessly out of touch._

Desperately and hopelessly out of touch perhaps for you. The reason it's
inspiring is the same reason that working at a great company or in a great
computer lab or on great software is inspiring. You're working on something
where your philosophy is embodied by the software.

The hubris and the sheer scale are called planning ahead. Instead of solving
problem X, Nelson wanted to solve problems X, Y and Z all at once. Some
problems need to be tackled all at once and Nelson was right about this. How
many implementations of payments and micropayments have we seen that have
failed on the Web? They fail because they aren't integrated with the Web.

 _But even that alone was enough to build a functional and useful internet for
the world_

The Internet was already useful without the Web.

 _Consider the reality of what's actually possible, what people can
understand, and what us all too human programmers can practically implement.
It might not be the Xanadu you dreamed of -- heck, it might even suck -- but
it'll at least have a fighting chance of existing in reality rather than
fantasy._

If all we do is build good-enough software, we'll end up just applying patch
after hacky patch to it to make it do the 100% thing. Again, sometimes you
have to design with the whole of the problem in mind. Turn the corner cases
into normal cases, in other words.

Off-topic... I'm sick and tired of having to defend the history of computing.
I had to defend Smalltalk yesterday, and I've had to defend Lisp and Scheme
against people as well. I had to defend friggin' Java against C...I shouldn't
have to do that.

~~~
davidmathers
_I'm sick and tired of having to defend the history of computing._

Um, it's codinghorror. The author has no reputation for knowledge, insight or
understanding. He's just a guy who talks about stuff. The programmer on the
street, if you will.

------
yesimahuman
" _Every Xanadu service provider_ "

I would much rather live with broken links than rely on the centralized
infrastructure that would be required to implement anything like Xanadu (which
would ultimately end up being a government, university, or business run system
anyways). Sure, Facebook Connect and Microsoft Passport are commercial
"poison" in terms of centralized identification and authentication, but at
least we have the ability to choose or implement our own systems.

~~~
joe_the_user
Bingo,

Nelson anticipating many of the features of the web was great. The extra
features he "anticipated" were exactly what made Xanadu impossible to
implement as well _undesirable_ to implement (see RMS' The Right To Read).

~~~
omouse
_The extra features he "anticipated" were exactly what made Xanadu impossible
to implement_

And yet everyone wants to implement all of those features eventually...funny
how that works.

~~~
evgen
Isn't that how it always happens? Someone will come up with a grand vision
that is impossible to implement given the current technology or environment.
Someone else will strip it down to the essential bits that are achievable. The
next person will add another feature or layer that adds value to the network
as a whole (and which would be valueless if it were not for that first,
dumbed-down version), etc.

~~~
davidmathers
aka "Worse is Better"

------
eleitl
While I always been a great fan of Ted Nelson, his vision does not include
distributed cryptographic filestores, where documents do not reside on
individual servers, and where individual servers are in fact completely
invisible and redundant.

~~~
abecedarius
IIRC one of the Xanadu hackers invented or reinvented the idea of the
cryptohash of a document as a self-verifying identifier for the kind of lookup
you mention. Are you sure that was not in the vision, even if Nelson himself
was not so technical? (How I remember this: it came up on a mailing list (cap-
talk?) when people were looking for prior art to challenge a patent. I may
have it wrong.)

~~~
evgen
Yes, it was one of the Xanadu hackers who came up with that one (but it was
never published and stayed internal to that group.) Post-Xanadu the idea
migrated to Joule, Inc. then to Electric Communities, then MojoNation, and
after that it just became the way things were done...

------
MikeHawk
_"shipping is a feature"_

Yes indeed, it's the most powerful feature your software have.

~~~
DannoHung
Hmm... what about working?

~~~
pavlov
Shipping comes first. You won't find out if it really works without shipping
it.

