--- In postmodernprogramming@yahoogroups.com, Stephen Freeman
<steve@m...> wrote:
>
> On 1 Feb 2006, at 10:34, Keith Braithwaite wrote:
> > fantastic notion to me. Which raises the question: how would you go
> > about learning a language like a post-modernist?
>
> The way most people do... Skim through enough of the book/tutorial to
> figure out the basics of the syntax and to get something to run. Then
> copy and paste an example from the web/MSDN that mostly does what you
> need. Rinse and repeat.
>
> Now I think of it, the great enabler of this approach is not having
> pointers. As Joel Spolsky points out, there's a real divide between
> those who can handle malloc and those who can't. Are we all VB
> programmers now?
Ah, now there's a can of worms. See, I can handle malloc. I can even
handle platforms where you have to manually manage storage on the
_stack_, never mind the heap. I know you can handle malloc. And
Michael. I'll bet that everyone who posts on this group can handle malloc.

Is this perhaps part of what lets us get away with being post-modern?

See, in the poetry world right now there's a little bit of a revival
of prosody going on. As an intro there's Stephen Fry with "The Ode
Less Travelled", and once you've got the hang of that, there's James
Fenton's "The Strength of Poetry" and so on. A growing number of folks
are thinking again that maybe it would be a good idea if someone who
wants to call themsleves a poet understood something about
scansion and rhyme, how they work, what they're for, what effects they
have and when to (and not) use them. This is a reaction to the school
of poetry writing that allows one to get away with
putting some
words
of
a sentence on dif-
-ferent lines all chopped up and some very long and some very
short
throw in some ;siudhfq9823y"£$%4-982-=82"£%$=24387wepsdnf
print it sideways, call it a poem and who's to say otherwise?

And that came, as far as I can tell, from a misunderstanding of
postmodernism. The modernists understood the old rules and made up new
ones to replace them (and were every bit as scandalous as any
contemporary artist today in doing so), the first most-podernists
understood the old rules and the new modern rules and made their own
new rules on the fly and chose between the three of them as they
whished. The "folk post-modernists" as we might call them observed
that the resulting material seemed not to have had any rules appled
unless you looked quite carefully, didn't bother to do that and then
inferred that therefore no rules needed to be understood and had a
field day.

Some folks I know sometimes get themsleves a cheap holiday by signing
up for the "artist in residence" scheme at a hotel in Cornwall. Anyone
can do this: as far as the hotel is concerned if you call yourself an
artist, you are one. After all, who's to say what's good or bad,
right? It's all subjective...well the folks I know don't just call
themselves artists they are, and they can tell, and they report that
the hotel is crammed with really, really shockingly bad "art".

Throw that hotel's management's attitude into the mix and many
branches of the arts have ended up in a sorry state of randomised
mediocrity.

But there's still good stuff out there and pretty much universally
it's made be people who actually understand what they are doing and
have a high level of skill as well as being talented and inventive.
And still they can combine and create in was that remain surprising
(and would horrify a Modernist of 90 years ago).

So, is there a route to being po-mo that dosn't involve understanding
pointers first but still leaves you competent?

Keith