[cap-talk] Selling capabilities programming

[James A. Donald]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
 > James: a detailed discussion about the Xanadu design
 > and the Xanadu team is really outside the scope of
 > this list.

When I commented that the work on capabilities had a
distressing resemblance to the work on Xanadu, I was
unaware that anyone working on capabilities had worked
on Xanadu.

I had no desire to start a conversation on Xanadu, but
simply presupposed that everyone would recognize this as
a horror story illustrating how things should not be
done.  Evidently, not everyone on this list regards
Xanadu as a well known cautionary tale of how not to do
a radical new project.

 > This raises my curiosity. If you don't know any of the
 > people involved, how do you have sufficient
 > understanding of what happened at Xanadu to offer such
 > a strong opinion? What is the source of your
 > competency?

Its a fairly famous disaster, and if some people have
difficulty perceiving the cause of the disaster, perhaps
they were a little too close.