
TogetherJS as a Postmodern Programming Tool - ianbicking
http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2013/10/togetherjs-a-postmodern-tool.html
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jsnk
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?

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cmhamill
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.

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

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xsace
I misread postmortem and thought it was already dead

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

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dshipper
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](http://usefirefly.com).

It works all the way back to IE 8 :)

