--- In postmodernprogramming@yahoogroups.com, Edward Summers <ehs@...>
wrote:
>
> On Apr 7, 2006, at 5:15 AM, Nat Pryce wrote:
> > The happiest valediction on the V&A show is that at least peoples
> > across Europe rejected all it celebrates. They denied modernism's
> > odious utopianism.
>
> What a lovely phrase 'odious utopianisms'
>
> The review definitely got my mind working on what the 'odious
> utopianisms' of computer programming are today.

Well now, on the one hand there's the reto-utopians: wild-eyed bearded
mystics offering to their neophites a glimps of the hidden mysteries
that powered the ineffable wonder of the blissful lost word now sunk
beneath the waves. Can be diffiult to understand, as they often talk
with a Lisp. Anything we have now they had then, only better. Plus a
bunch more stuff that we haven't reinvented yet. The Smalltalk tends
to be replaced with a chilly silence just after anyone asks them what
exactly they have to show for their once mighty powers.

And on the other hand there are the bright young things: brains
pulsating all over the place, they took the ancient secrets, performed
upon them an inversion through the center of the universe (I said they
were bright) and now have worked out to the n-th degree the most
subtle and briliant provably correct answers to every
question---except the ones that enyone who works for a living is
asking. With these folks the chill silence replaces the HUGS just
after you ask quite what's going to happen to their grand new Schemes
after the Red Dressing-gown of Wisdom goes back to the hire shop.

Neither group worries me overly much.

No, the ones I fear are the sharp-suited, cold eyed ones. The
spiritual heirs to Frederick Taylor. The ones who offer to make my
office into a factory (for my own good, of course). Like some B-movie
creature from the depths they seem to have been defeated only to rise
again in some new and more hideous form. They lure innocent young
business folk into their lair with sweet promises of "productivity",
only to suck them dry of cash, meanwhile their wizards press the life
out of captured programmers under the weight of huge boulders of XML.

They're the guys you have to worry about. The ones who woudl replace
creativity with meta-data. Who would turn master toolmakers into
fitters. Who want to make a better, faster, cheaper world and all you
have to do to get there is hand over your imagination.