Modern vs Post-modern

I agree with Larry Wall that we live in a postmodern society, and that noticing it matters, especially in the realm of software engineering. The important word in this designation is post, implying that we are not anymore in a modern society, that modernity is over, obsolete. What has changed is that we crossed a threshold, with qualitative implications.

In short, one could say that:

• modernity was based on discrete categories and continuous phenomena, whereas
• post-modernity is based on continuous categories and discrete phenomena.

This simple philosophical statement has many practical consequences.

As an example, one may note that modern and postmodern are discrete categories, therefore modern and indeed, we can say with Bruno Latour that we have never been modern. In other words, modernity proved to be an unreachable goal. One of its ultimate achievements was to make this clear.

This kind of reflexive concern is at the heart of post-modernity, which is why our own categories become the focus of our attention, and lose their clear-cut boundaries.

• One cannot fool oneself in believing that one ought to determine first some abstract processes, and to implement them next into, or using, some concrete tools. This is an oversimplification. Abstraction is always the concrete abstraction of something and the processes always depend on a context.
• Open Source is the concern of commercial companies. Yet, there can be no Producer-Consumer relationship in Open Source, anymore: only producers.
• SCM is the post-modern anti-thesis of modern CM. CM dissolves there: there is no CM, unless SCM. SCM must itself be manageable, it cannot be an opaque layer, delegated to a dedicated organization.

-- MarcGirod - 28 Oct 2007