Reading Venkatesh Rao‘s article “A Text Renaissance“, and part of it is some interesting thoughts on Roam (“a note-taking tool for networked thought”). I stumbled across org-roam (emulating Roam in Emacs) recently, while looking for a way of improving my flow of working on my wiki, and am loving it so far.
Venkatesh says:
Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries like Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson.
Returning to these ideas is exciting.
The text renaissance is an actual renaissance. It’s a story of history-inspired renewal in a very fundamental way: exciting recent developments are due in part to a new generation of young product visionaries circling back to the early history of digital text, rediscovering old, abandoned ideas, and reimagining the bleeding edge in terms of the unexplored adjacent possible of the 80s and 90s.
Roam is built on Clojure (a modern Lisp), so props there too. I’m unlikely to use it myself, as it’s a silo, but looking forward to working in this style.