Post Modernism

A style and school of thought that rejects the dogma and practices of any form of ModernIsm. In architecture it contrasts with International Modernism, featuring elements from several periods, especially the Classical, often with ironic use of decoration.

A couple of good books about post-modernism:

Developing Information Technology in a Post-modern Era
The Postmodern Explained, by Lyotard; ISBN 0-8166-2211-6 (maybe ISBN 0816611734 , by Lyotard, was intended)

also,

Intellectual Impostures, by Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont; ISBN 1861976313

Pretty thoroughly debunks several leading French PostModern gurus in as far as their use of scientific/mathematical words/concepts/notations is shown to be meaningless. For a more humorous debunking, see:

ChipMorningstar?, "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure" (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/decon.html)

Part of the PostModern heritage is that contradictions between various fields of study are allowed to exist, making the SearchForTruth utterly futile, as there is not OneTruth?, but many.

Some of us are extremely skeptical of this BuzzWord known as PostModernism... Basically it's the same as saying "the future". What comes after modern day? The next day after that, which is the future. Everything on the entire planet is preparing for the future (except conservative bible thumpers, like Larry Wall, who still hold their old PreModernism beliefs).

In the context of PostModern Modern doesn't mean present day, it means something like the 1950s.

This is described in the very good (though unsympathetically titled) paper On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/pub_search?104+1996+bulhak+Postmodernism

I always thought that Perl was the first PostModernistProgrammingLanguage. LateCeePlusPlus was the second one that mattered. AspectOrientedProgramming and MultiParadigmDesign is really PostModernProgramming. -- JamesNoble (opinion, not fact)

See LarryWall for a terse précis of, and pointer to, a very interesting LarryWall talk about PostModernism and how it relates to computer languages - in his opinion, of course.

See also "Notes on Postmodern Programming" (http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html) by James Noble and Robert Biddle.

If pomo programming is based on multi-paradigm and aspect-like constructs, surely lisp is the first pomo language...

Lisp is more modern in that it offers all-encompassing grand solutions. Perl is postmodern in that it favors local solutions - terse solutions to common problems - over grand schemes.

It sounds like PerlLanguage should be considered PostStructural? more than PostModern. But maybe PostStructuralism? is a subset of PostModernism. It's all French to me (pun intended).

The recent 'remodernist' or 'stuckist' art movement has been attempting - in their view - to move art away from the media driven postmodernism back towards an art form.

See: http://www.stuckism.com/index.html, NotesOnPostmodernProgramming, and PostModernLiteraryCriticism

Postmodernism was the solution when the competition for WhatIsTruth became greater than Mankind's ability or desire to find it. -- MarkJanssen