Keith Braithwaite wrote:

>
>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?
>
>
I think there is. The thing that I take away from the
Modernism/Post-modernism dichotomy is the issue of "grand narratives."
I've always been troubled by the fact that people don't do what they say
or say what they do.. the fact that software development is a messy
process and there are people who wish that it was clean. In fact, for
some developers, messiness could be staring them in the face and they
simply don't recognize it. Ask them about their history as developers
and they come up with example after example of experiences discordant
with their current beliefs or view of the way that software should be
developed, yet they themselves may not even notice the discord. I'm
very interested in this process: how we trick ourselves with the stories
we tell ourselves.

Things I've read about pomo leave me with the impression that (in most
of its guises) it is largely a rebellion against a teleological view of
rationality (I'm not sure if I'm using 'teleological' correctly here).
So, people feel the rules are confining, so they make up their own rules
and it's a big party, but if you try to map it all back to what people
really know, everyone gets nervous. I guess it makes sense as a
reaction to most of what happened in the early to middle 20th century.

For me, the struggle is to get people to see what they really do and
where their stories are stifling.. but people have preconceived ideas
about the way things should be. You can show them another way of
looking at things, and a third, but it's hard for many people to handle
that many and often they are lost in the wilderness when their original
way was found lacking

(done rambling)