[cmhamill]

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.

[monting]

This is the clearest concise explanation I've seen on Modernism and Postmodernism, thanks for that. Can you explain Post-postmodernism?

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

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!