

Postmodern Programming - danw
http://www.postmodernprogramming.org/

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MaysonL
Yes, but. From Alan Kay[1]:

"One of the keys to how all this worked was the PARC version of Catch-22,
known as "Error-33". One committed Error-33 by putting any externally
controlled system, in-house or out, on one's critical path. This included
vendors. Error-33 was avoided by doing all that was necessary within a
research group and then sharing. Thus, virtually all the PARC hardware —
including two big time-sharing main frames, the Altos, Ethernet, Laserprinter,
file storage, and the systems that followed — and software — including
operating systems, programming languages and development systems, productivity
tools, etc. — were completely built inhouse by these few dozen researchers.

This sounds disastrous, but there is an important collection of theories in
which the 1st order version and the 2nd order version are completely different
yet both are true. For example, in programming there is a wide-spread 1st
order theory that one shouldn't build one's own tools, languages, and
especially operating systems. This is true—an incredible amount of time and
energy has gone down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you can build your
own tools, languages and operating systems, then you absolutely should because
the leverage that can be obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to
fix other people's not quite right tools) can be incredible."

[1] <http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf>

~~~
jerf
Open Source radically alters the equation; when I build a system on Open
Source, even though I may not have built it, I _do_ own it. I own it
collectively, but still fully individually, in a way that really only works
for software. As a home user I don't find myself fiddling with source often,
but as a professional programmer building on an open source stack I do it _all
the time_ , and it is qualitatively different than working on a closed stack.

At PARC, I'm sure the cost of "fixing other people's stuff" was more than
"building your own"; a few hundred million lines of code later, that balance
has changed a bit.

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davatk
Also see Larry Wall's fairly odd take on postmodern programming:
<http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html>

