Notes on Notes on Postmodern Programming: Condensed Edition in 4 Pages

These notes have the status of letters written to ourselves: we wrote them down because, without doing so, we found ourselves making up new arguments over and over again. So began the abstract of our earlier paper Notes on Postmodern Programming. We now revisit the issue of postmodern programming, and attempt to address some of the questions raised by our exposition. To illustrate the nature of postmodernism we do not do this directly, but instead present a series of snapshots, parodies, and imagined conversations that we hope will help. What do you think of the abstract so far? Self-reference and a irreverent approach are part of this topic, so it’s important to chill out and let things flow. We claim that computer science and software design grew up amid the unquestioned landscape of modernism, and that too often we cling to the otherwise ungrounded values, even as modernism itself is ever more compromised.