I've heard of the term postmodern being used in literature and media, but I am not sure how it's related to technology. Can someone explain how postmodern tools are different from just tools in general? And how postmodern programming is different from programming in general?
I can't really speak to the programming part of it (but it almost certainly has a lot to do with Perl), but this article has a pretty, um, interesting conception of what makes something postmodern.
The basic idea is that modernism is the idea that there exists a state that is somehow better, more advanced, more organized, for a given system, and the goal of human endeavor is to move towards that. Postmodernism is basically a skepticism towards that viewpoint, trying to pull the teleological aspects out of it, saying that there's no intrinsic metric by which a given system can be measured to determine its relative state of progress towards more advanced forms.
The idea the article is getting at is that there's an analogous approach to programming which says that there's no intrinsic measurement by which a program can be measured which will tell us its quality.
It's kind of flawed as an analogy really, for a variety of fairly subtle reasons. I should write a "Pomo for Programmers" and post it here some time.
So can TogetherJS be postmodern and work in IE? I guess not?
Also, I'm getting the feeling golang is a postmodern programming language and clojure (lispishness) is not, but I'm new to this whole postmodern thing, which is probably the wrong attitude completely.
Edit: I read the first paragraph and I was right about lisp, yay!
According to his example in the first few paragraphs, he calls "Smalltalk and Lisp" modern and "Perl and Unix" postmodern, so the postmodern view would correspond to the "Worse is Better" ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=worse+is+better ) approach.
It's largely about Perl (delivered at a Linux conference), but I believe it will give you some material to consider while exploring how postmodernism applies to technology.
This was mentioned in the article, but if you're looking for a TogetherJS-like tool that takes a different approach to collaboration you should look at what we've put together at Firefly: http://usefirefly.com.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] threadThe basic idea is that modernism is the idea that there exists a state that is somehow better, more advanced, more organized, for a given system, and the goal of human endeavor is to move towards that. Postmodernism is basically a skepticism towards that viewpoint, trying to pull the teleological aspects out of it, saying that there's no intrinsic metric by which a given system can be measured to determine its relative state of progress towards more advanced forms.
The idea the article is getting at is that there's an analogous approach to programming which says that there's no intrinsic measurement by which a program can be measured which will tell us its quality.
It's kind of flawed as an analogy really, for a variety of fairly subtle reasons. I should write a "Pomo for Programmers" and post it here some time.
Also, I'm getting the feeling golang is a postmodern programming language and clojure (lispishness) is not, but I'm new to this whole postmodern thing, which is probably the wrong attitude completely.
Edit: I read the first paragraph and I was right about lisp, yay!
http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
It's largely about Perl (delivered at a Linux conference), but I believe it will give you some material to consider while exploring how postmodernism applies to technology.
It works all the way back to IE 8 :)