Steve Witham

sw at tiac dot net http://www.tiac.net/~sw

I'm interested in everything, so what can I say that's relevant here? Software design; the process of design; design vs evolution and their hybrids; evolution and learning; collaborative and ant-hill-like creation. Security and modularity effects of language and system designs.

I was a TedNelson apprentice and a Xanadu project hanger-on. From Ted I got the "outsider-insider" view on computers: user advocacy and distance from the status quo / party line / main paradigms, combined with enthusiasm and insistence on delving into technical details; an appreciation for how the low level details percolate and ramify into outward qualities of systems; an awareness of the industry politics of the evolution of technologies.

Xanadu's original code is open-sourced at http://udanax.com, and http://sunless-sea.net is a wiki about understanding and reimplementing the ideas. Xu involves fine-grained bidirectional links, compositing, and versions, so that the whole "docuverse" would be somewhere between a Wiki (anyone can add comments to any part of anything) and the Web as a whole (each doc is still owned and controlled by an individual). Wikis per se are interesting to me because they are set up so the readers and creators are the same sorts of people, seeing the same views.

I'm more of an Alexander patterns guy (ethical / ideological / aesthetic / user-soul-liveability) than a GOF patterns guy. You might think Gabriel's "habitability" was a link between the two, but he's talking about habitability for programmers rather than users - exactly the reason most software is not Alexandrian. (See SoftwarePatternsArentAlexanderPatterns.)

I just have to sign this so I have a circular link:

-- SteveWitham

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