Pomopro - the 1st International Conference on Post-Modern Programming

On Saturday, Nov 25^th, London will host the first conference on post-modern programming.

 “Post-modern what?”

Yes, you heard correctly – post-modern programming. PMP is a point of view about programming that was first written up in a set of papers by James Noble and Robert Biddle ( paper-1 and paper-2  ). The papers are funny in that “ha ha only serious” way.

 The gist of PMP is that our industry has had a modernist bent since its inception. We look for the grand plan, the methodology that will solve all our troubles, and we believe in crystalline structure  - regular pristine components that don’t need modification..

We know in our hearts that none of this is true,  but we hope, and because we hope we spend a lot of time trying to vanquish these ghosts.. but they keep popping up like possessed whack-a-moles. In the meantime, many programmers have no trouble ignoring them. They string together pieces of existing code; they cut, they paste. They call Perl from shell and shell from C, and in short, they do things that keep the engines cranking.

I’m a modernist at heart. Give me Scheme, give me Self, give me Io.  I guess that's what I get for having been born in the 60s.  I don't think I'll ever make a peace with the big ball of mud but I know that we don't do ourselves any favors by ignoring it.