Xanadu Basics – Visible Connection (2018) [video]
I get the same feelings reading his descriptions of Xanadu as I did reading descriptions of Google Wave. It all sounds a though it aught to be great and wonderful, but I can&#x27;t actually visualise how it would be useful every day. What actual value would I get out of it, constantly on an ongoing basis?<p>I can see how perhaps you could construct interesting use cases, but I just don&#x27;t see the value as a primary interface. It doesn&#x27;t even sound all that hard to implement. I know there&#x27;s a basic implementation, but his description of it is hedged around with caveats. Certainly with modern development environments, it should be many orders of magnitude easier than in the 60s or 70s to get this working, yet it&#x27;s still struggling to get off the ground. Contrast with the web he is so critical of, which was useful and valuable the first day it was released.<p>If it takes 50 years and you still don&#x27;t even have a compelling proof of concept, I can&#x27;t help suspecting the grand vision is just far too elaborate and heavy weight to be workable in practice.