Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight

(gwern.net)

28 points | by andsoitis 2 hours ago

2 comments

  • WillAdams 1 hour ago
    The other books on hardware from this timeframe such as Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ or Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ or Andy Hertzfeld's _Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made_ (available as: https://folklore.org/0-index.html) are quite striking and forthright in their discussion of hardware limitations and the ingenuity needed to get things done.

    The book _CAD History_, available on-line at: https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/introduction has a bit on Xanadu from the Autodesk end of things.

    Or, contrast the far more prosaic _Weaving the Web_ by Tim Berners-Lee and esp. take note of compromises such as URL changing from Universal Resource Locator to Uniform Resource Locator.

    • markus_zhang 48 minutes ago
      I really like the analogy of “pinball” from _The Soul of a New Machine_. It matches my imagination of good engineers perfectly.
  • gritzko 21 minutes ago
    I always believed that side-by-side diff view is a transclusion interface.

    Also, permalinks can work on top of git quite nicely https://replicated.live/blog/link

    If git's pack index gets refactored slightly, it can do anything from trigram-indexed search to metadata indexing to hyperlinking both ways across repos. That is actually useful, I use it: https://replicated.live/blog/wiki

    CRDT merges are a very incremental upgrade for git https://replicated.live/blog/meta

    The funny part is, git developers likely did not read such wacky books. Also, linux kernel is one of very few projects that have no dependencies at all. The rest adopted what linux developers use.

    We don't get what we want or what we need. Instead, we move erratically in very small, easy, local steps.