He is the archetypal borderline autistic, non-conformist, free-thinking technologist. This is incorrect. Like most programmers, Ted's reach often exceeded his

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.