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.
I like Ted Nelson a lot, mostly because I relate to his chaotic way of thinking, and I admire his ideas, and the work he puts towards making his ideas reality even more so.
Yet, even in his more recent content, he's still stubborn as ever, anyone who wants to simplify his ideas to appeal to a mainstream audience "doesn't get my vision".
He's had great ideas, great visions, but he shoots himself in the foot with hi is approach.
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
> 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.
This is an idea I've seen popup over and over. I suspect the transaction costs in using, let alone maintaining, the tools needed to do this well are what prevent it from ever reaching widespread adoption. Consider the 'leftpad' debacle as one example.
> 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.
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.
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.