TogetherJS as a Postmodern Programming Tool | Hacker News Reader

TogetherJS as a Postmodern Programming Tool

ianbicking.org

46 pointsianbicking11 comments

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.

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

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.

I found this talk rather illuminating; I try to re-read it at least every couple years.

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.

There's the venerable C2 wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PostModernProgramming

I misread postmortem and thought it was already dead

Does anyone know how to make TogetherJS work on IE (just the chat/presence/co-browsing stuff) ???

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.

It works all the way back to IE 8 :)

Seems like fixing it to work in IE10 and later should not be difficult because these versions support WebSockets.

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