Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

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It does. There are distinct properties attached to Modernism and Modern. (I'm architect, hence I'm very much attached to these terms. Unlike SW people who didn't grow up with that).

First of all, it's the opposite of Post-Modern, to the perl style do it all in myriads of ways, everything is allowed, OpenSSL style. With Modern, only the best API and implementation is allowed. API's are Stanford style well-planned ahead of time, and not adhoc added New-Jersey style. Changes to the API need a rename, not just a major version bump. Hand-waving simplified development models are okay for a post-modern everything is allowed world, whilst modernism aims for long-term goals, making it easier for the user, not the developer.

Modernism is based on "Form Follows Function", and not the other way round. Reduce it, abstract it. Functionalism is everything, marketing is less important.

And to avoid popular misconceptions, in our current era "Modern" doesn't mean "New" at all. Modern is more old Stanford-style development. Check the Unix Haters handbook e.g. Rust is new, but this choice alone doesn't allow the use of Modern. Rust is better, because of its superior semantics and guarantees, whilst still adhering to the C ABI. It's a library for everybody afterall, and not comparable to the latest ocaml, haskell or lisp TLS library, which only adheres to their ABI and needs wrappers to be useful for projects in other languages.

You've given a while bunch of definitions for what you interpret modern to mean but none of those are inherent in the word which is what (I think) the op meant when complaining about its over usage.

So while I appreciate your attempt to redefine "modern" with all the above I'd rather people just used the more verbose explanation instead of using the meaningless term.

My personal list of "I'd rather" is pretty large. We should get together and compare notes.

Nothing is inherent in a word other than what people understand it to mean, and the worlds where 'modern' is a term of jargon are larger overall than computing. It has fairly specific meanings in art, architecture, literature, and music.

Grandparent referred to the meaning of the jargon term in architecture. It's not his personal redefinition; it's an interpretation of a widespread understanding of the word mapped analogously to software.

Jargon is important. We'd have a hard time communicating if we could never create new words or imbue existing ones with new meanings by analogy. The more verbose explanation is mostly useful for laymen and beginners.

He's not redefining the term, he's giving the 'official' definition of modern from the humanities.

The word has spread in popular vernacular to mean 'the present' or 'contemporary' but for historians, philosophers, architects, art critics, critical theorists, etc. "modern" refers to a bunch of things, and the "modern era" is considered by many of them to be either over, extended, or exaggerated.

I think Shakespeare got this one right:

  2. New and common; trite; commonplace. [Obs.]
     [1913 Webster]
  
     We have our philosophical persons, to make modern
     and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.
                                               --Shak.

Isn't that what we want from "modern" software? To "make modern and familiar" "things supernatural and causeless"? :-)

Another interpretation of Modernist Development is team size:

A modern SW project consists typically of 1-2, max. 3 devs, a typical post-modern project of 20-200. With such member sizes consensus is rarely practical, political correctness and CoC discussions are taking over development, ABI and API's are driven by design and not by functionality and longevity.

I.e. modern development is small, functional and not designed by committee.

a typical post-modern project of 20-200. With such member sizes consensus is rarely practical, political correctness and CoC discussions are taking over development, ABI and API's are driven by design and not by functionality and longevity.

Is this something you feel to be true, or do you have any evidence to back up that claim?

Why are you conflating building architecture and software architecture. I'm pretty sure no software developer has every thought of their project in terms of "post-modern."

New Jersey style? The PERL style? I've never heard of "New Jersey style." Are you joking? I'm almost positive that Perl didn't influence openssl development at all.

"Modern is more old Stanford-style development." I think you've read way to much into this. And sorry citing the "The UNIX Hater's Handbook" doesn't do much for the credibility of your odd argument.

New Jersey style is a reference to Richard Gabriel's "Worse is better" essay.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

[2] http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Look into "New Jersey vs. MIT" and "worse is better". The idea more or less is that AT&T (in Jersey) cared more about software that shipped whereas MIT cared about more about good design. MIT produced Lisp and Lisp machines, Bell Labs produced C and Unix. Who won?

The mainframes and OpenVMS (though its clone, Windows). They're produced closer to the MIT and cathedral styles with a practical focus. The mainframes still run the backends of our financial system, logistics, big retailers, and so on. Most stuff that people consume requires one of them. If a desktop is involved, it's usually Windows based with 90+% of the market share despite UNIX workstations and Linux desktops existing for a long time.

So, who won? Nobody. Both had success. Most successful, though, was combining a little bit of MIT method, cathedral, and ship fast from "worse is better." That's IBM and Microsoft's approach. A hybrid worthy of another Gabriel essay.

Thanks for the additional perspective there. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Sure thing. :) And here's the OpenVMS & Windows connection in case you weren't aware of it:

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

Bill robbing Apple of GUI is well-known. Less known is he stole a more robust and secure architecture from OpenVMS that was most rock-solid of OS's. They managed to show what would happen if OpenVMS had no QA process during development. Yet, recent efforts have gotten Windows Server reliable enough that the connection is more believable. :)

Perl is explicitly postmodern. Here's Larry Wall explaining it: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

What about all of these Perl scripts generating assembly code for AES for every architecture under the sun? https://github.com/openssl/openssl/tree/master/crypto/aes/as...

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